Shared from parkinsonsnewstoday.com.
Researchers have uncovered a previously overlooked type of electrical brain activity — an irregular signal they call noise — that closely tracks the severity of motor symptoms in people with Parkinson’s disease.
The discovery, made by scientists at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, in collaboration with research teams from two other German universities and two in the U.K., offers new insights into how Parkinson’s alters brain signaling. The findings illustrate that disease “features beyond conventional [ones]” are “critical to understanding” the physiological processes of Parkinson’s, according to the team.
Focusing on so-called brain noise may help refine deep brain stimulation (DBS), a treatment that uses mild electrical pulses to modulate abnormal brain activity and ease Parkinson’s symptoms, the team noted.