• J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatr. · May 2021

    Adoption of focused ultrasound thalamotomy for essential tremor: why so much fuss about FUS?

    • Christian Iorio-Morin, Mojgan Hodaie, and Andres M Lozano.
    • Neurosurgery, Faculté de médecine et des sciences de la santé, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada christian.iorio-morin@usherbrooke.ca.
    • J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatr. 2021 May 1; 92 (5): 549-554.

    BackgroundFocused ultrasound (FUS) was approved as a new treatment modality for essential tremor (ET) in 2016. The goal of this study was to quantify FUS adoption for ET and understand its drivers.MethodsThe adoption of the various surgical options for ET was estimated using three measures: the number of presentations on the various surgical treatments for ET at specialised international meetings, the number of original papers published as identified by literature searches and the number of thalamotomy procedures performed worldwide for ET as provided by device manufacturers' registries.ResultsFirst, we found that the number of presentations related to lesioning procedures is increasing relative to deep brain stimulation (DBS) at international meetings. Second, there are already more publications on FUS (93) than stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) (68) or radiofrequency (43) for ET, although they still lag behind DBS papers (750). Third, the number of annual FUS thalamotomies performed for ET (n>1200 in 2019) in 44 centres has surpassed the annual procedures across 342 Gamma Knife units (n<400, 2018) but is yet to reach the number of DBS cases for ET estimated at over 2400/year.ConclusionFUS is being rapidly adopted for the treatment of ET. We hypothesise that its perceived minimally invasive nature coupled with the ability to perform intraoperative clinical assessments, its immediate effects and active marketing efforts are contributing factors. As lesioning modalities for the treatment of ET are reappraised, the superior popularity of FUS over SRS appears to arise for reasons other than differences in clinical outcomes.© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2021. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…