Dr. Okun was quoted in the New York Times article on June 1st, “New Electrical Brain Stimulation Technique Shows Promise in Mice.” You can read it online using this link.
Dr. Michael Okun, a neurologist at the University of Florida and medical director for the Parkinson’s Foundation, said delivering electricity to people who need it occasionally or even once a day seemed more feasible than for people with “complex diseases like Parkinson’s who have a need for near-continuous stimulation.”
All the experts wondered about logistics: Would patients use a portable, wearable electricity-delivery device? And they emphasized a need to direct electricity to smaller, more precise brain locations, a limitation Dr. Boyden said he hoped could be addressed by using more electrodes.
“We’ve got to avoid areas of the brain that might cause motor contractions or weakness or problems with speech or vision,” Dr. Okun said. “A couple of millimeters in brain space could be the distance between Florida and Australia.”
Still, he said, so far “they’ve accomplished something that’s fairly remarkable.”