Dr. Casey Halpern

You know, people that have been gene disorder, at least at a severe level, they tend to bitch about once a day.

So what we decided to do in the operating room was to actually try to leverage a tool that we use all the time when we take care of patients with Parkinson's.

So with Parkinson's, a lot of these patients, not all, have tremor.

And so when we place an electrode into this motor structure,

to try to improve their movement disorder, we often can hear tremor cells.

And they sound, we convert their electrical signal to an audible signal so we can actually hear it.

And it sounds kind of like the tremor looks, like the frequency of the signal is the same as the hand shaking.

Exactly.

One poke at a time.

Exactly.

So we are very confident that when we stimulate that area of, in this case, the subthalamic nucleus, we will disrupt that tremor circuit and that tremor will dissolve.

Craving.

So craving is a term that, you know, there's probably other terms we could use, by the way, but that's the term we've chosen to use for a number of reasons.

One, because people relate with that term.

People that have binge eating disorder or obesity, if you ask them if they crave, the answer will often be yes.

If you ask them if they lose control or binge, they might not know what you mean, or they might not actually feel out of control, even when they are.

But the word craving is relatable.

And so we set out to see if we could identify craving cells.

In a patient with OCD, which is related, in fact, we target a very similar part of the brain,

we tried to identify cells related to obsessions.