A device that was approved by the FDA last year – and listed as one of TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions of 2025 – is helping to change the lives of Parkinson’s patients, acting like an adaptive pacemaker for the brain that “only fires when needed”, and which helps to reduce tremors and “defog the brain”, reports CNN.
Keith Krehbiel has broken more ribs than he can count – from bike crashes to falls during pickleball matches. Another time, he climbed the steps in his home and blacked out just as he reached the top.
“Falling is a common symptom of people with Parkinson’s,” he said. Krehbiel is among the estimated 10m people worldwide with Parkinson’s disease.
Krehbiel, a long-time business and political science Professor at Stanford University, has dealt with the disease for nearly three decades, diagnosed in 1997 with early onset Parkinson’s at the age of 42.
With the help of medication, he figured out a way “to live with it”. Based on one study of people with early onset Parkinson’s, Krehbiel calculated he would live to about 55, maybe 60.
But as the years went by, his symptoms intensified, as did his falls, the slowing of his nervous system and the side effects of medications. He felt as if he were living in a brain fog and was nauseous all the time. Movements that were once easy became laborious.
“Your breathing slows, your heart rate slows,” he said, describing the combination of living with Parkinson’s and medication side effects.
“Everything slows down. I stand up, I get dizzy. I have to train myself to expect that.”
Krehbiel would eventually become the first patient in a ground-breaking pivotal international clinical trial to receive an adaptive deep brain stimulation (aDBS) device.
The device senses brain activity in real time and tailors electrical pulses accordingly, like a pacemaker for the brain that only fires when needed.
“I thought, well, if you’re going to be cursed with something,” Krehbiel said, “you might as well try to contribute on your way out, so to speak, to put it morbidly.”
‘It’s just the beginning’
Dr Helen Bronte-Stewart, a Stanford Medicine Professor of Neurology and Neurological Science, has spent her career “trying to understand how the brain controls movement, what happens when it goes wrong and how we can fix it”.
Bronte-Stewart was the global lead investigator of the international multi-centre trial of aDBS for Parkinson’s patients, a study that resulted in FDA approval of the device, made by Medtronic, in February 2025.
TIME Magazine named the BrainSense aDBS one of the “Best Inventions of 2025”.
Tens of thousands of Parkinson’s patients have received traditional deep brain stimulation over the past two decades, in which leads, about the size of thin strands of spaghetti, are implanted in the brain providing electrical stimulation to control the brain’s electrical rhythms to ease tremors and other Parkinson’s symptoms.
The wires are attached to a small, battery-powered device implanted under the skin of the chest. The new device adjusts stimulation based on brain signals in real time.
“Until recently, these stimulation devices delivered a one-size-fits-all train of electric pulses to the brain around the clock,” Bronte-Stewart said. “They have helped some people but are a pretty blunt tool for trying to correct the brain arrythmias associated with Parkinson’s. Now, we have this adaptive technology that listens to brain activity and adjusts stimulation accordingly.”
The FDA approval, she said, felt like a validation of her decades of work.
“There’s a lot of joy in the discovery along the way,” she said, “when you’re doing that hard work and you see amazing interactions between these neural signals and these highly precise motor signals as people are doing complex acts.”
In fact, she said, it’s hard to fully describe what it feels like to see research conducted in her lab over many years come to fruition in the new device, with it “being picked up across the world and patients are really liking it”.
“I think it’s just the beginning,” she told CNN. “There’s a lot more to do, but certainly the beginning is very exciting.”
Bronte-Stewart, who was named the first woman neurologist in Stanford’s department of neurology about a dozen years ago, added: “It’s a really interesting dance to me – that science moves innovation forward, then technology catches up, then when it’s got enough evidence, regulatory approves it.”
‘It sure makes life better’
The aDBS device is not a cure. Bronte-Stewart calls it a “wonderful, stable, long-term therapy” with the technology only getting better with the aim of slowing Parkinson’s progression.
She compares the treatment breakthrough to when the earliest pacemakers couldn’t sense a person’s heartbeat, only delivering one steady electrical rhythm. That was the case of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s patients for years, until the adaptive device came along.
“When it’s on and working,” she said, “then people really do improve. They say their disease goes back at least five years.”
Krehbiel, her first patient in the clinical trial, has had his device in since 2020. In the five years since, his hand tremor has almost completely disappeared. He also has cut way down on medications that made him groggy, a feeling of relief after decades.
“I felt a lot better cognitively. My brain was less foggy. I just felt good,” he said. “It was just a psychologically cool feeling.”
CNN article – How a pacemaker for the brain could help Parkinson’s patients (Open access)
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Pacemaker for Parkinson’s gives new hope – US study
Small pioneering study offers hope to Parkinson’s patients
DBS may slow the progression of Parkinson's tremor in early-stage