Shawn Connolly was 39 years old and a professional skateboarder when he noticed his hands starting to clench unintentionally. He was also having bouts of stiffness and couldn't move as well as he used to.
"I mistakenly thought it was aging," Connolly said. "I've had sciatic problems and bad joints, like most athletes. But it turned out to be a little more than that."
A doctor diagnosed him in 2015 with early-onset Parkinson's disease and recommended he go to the UCSF Movement Disorders and Neuromodulation Clinic, which is renowned for its cutting-edge care in the field.
The clinic's co-director, Philip Starr, MD, PhD, was just beginning to work on a new self-adjusting pacemaker for the brain that held the promise of stemming Connolly's symptoms.
Brain implants are widely used to treat Parkinson's, a progressive neurological disease that affects 1 million people in the U.S. and 10 million around the world. But the technology currently available to patients is decades-old and no match for the ever-changing symptoms of the disease, which can vary from slowness and rigidity to waves of involuntary movement.
Starr's approach, called adaptive deep brain stimulation, or aDBS, responds to a person's symptoms in real time. Using data techniques and algorithms developed in the lab of Simon Little, MBBS, PhD, assistant professor of neurology and a member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, the device picks up on brain signals that indicate a symptom is developing and delivers just the right amount of electrical stimulation to stop it.
Connolly had landed at one of the few places in the world where patients like him could have the opportunity to participate in a trial of this experimental technology.
"Not all medical centers are willing to support surgeries that use investigational devices," said Starr, the Dolores Cakebread Professor of Neurological Surgery, who is also at the Weill Institute. "UCSF has a tradition of bringing investigational treatments like this into the clinical setting."
"I was so young," Connolly said. "People didn't look at me and say, 'Oh, that guy's got Parkinson's.'"
