 |
Functional and Movement Disorders Program
The goal of the UCLA Functional Neurosurgery Program and Neurosurgical Movement Disorders program is to implement cutting-edge surgical solutions to improve patients' quality of life. The program at UCLA sets itself apart from by integrating:
- Comprehensive Multidisciplinary Management
- Evidence-Based and Protocol-Driven Practice
- Advanced Surgical and Imaging Technologies
- Research and Innovation
Comprehensive Multidisciplinary Management
The cornerstone of the UCLA Functional Neurosurgery and Neurosurgical Movement Disorders Program is a multidisciplinary team that ensures comprehensive management and continuity of care for multiple disorders.
Comprehensive Management:
We provide comprehensive, multimodality treatment of the following conditions:
- Movement disorders: Parkinson's Disease, Essential tremor, Dystonias (including cervical dystonia)
- Spasticity: Due to spinal cord injury, head injury, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and stroke
- Headaches: Trigeminal neuralgia, occipital neuralgia, cluster headaches, and migraines
- Pain: Failed back syndrome and other medically-refractory pain
The advanced surgical techniques considered for treatment include:
- Deep brain stimulation (DBS)
- Radiofrequency ablation
- Intrathecal infusion pumps
- Microvascular decompression
- Stereotactic radiosurgery
- Motor cortex stimulation
- Spinal cord stimulation
The Team:
Our expert team of neurosurgeons works in consultation with a world-renowned team of neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, anesthesiologists, and pain management specialists to ensure:
- Personalized and individualized care.
- All medical (non-surgical) options have been explored.
- If necessary, the most appropriate surgery is recommended.
- The patient understands all treatment alternatives.
- Comfort and knowledge throughout every step of care.
Continuity of Care:
Our expert multidisciplinary team will guide you through every stage of your care from your preoperative evaluation, surgery, preoperative care, rehabilitation, programming, and long-term management. Our continuity-of-care program is designed to ensure that you realize the benefits from your surgery as quickly and safely as possible.
When appropriate, patients are immediately transferred to UCLA's Acute NeuroRehabilitation Unit for accelerate rehabilitation, programming, and medication titration - which has been shown in studies to significantly decrease the time needed to maximize the benefits from surgical intervention.
For patients who are treated with DBS, programming is a critical component of the postoperative care. UCLA's expert team of programmers will either work with your doctor to make sure you are programmed optimally or have you come in to UCLA to optimize your settings. For more information on programming, call 310-206-2536.
Evidence-Based and Protocol-Driven Practice
Our goal at UCLA is to provide the BEST care - care that is effective, efficient, safe, and world-class. In today's medical world, there are so many tests, studies, evaluations, and orders that it is easy to imagine how something can be overlooked. We recognize this and have therefore developed a protocol to make sure everything is ordered perfectly for EVERY PATIENT to ensure the best outcomes.
Our multidisciplinary team has scoured the literature and critically assessed our own outcomes to identify the key factors that affect the success and safety of our interventions and developed an evidence-based practice protocol that helps ensure that EVERY patient get the BEST care. This protocol includes guidelines that guide every stage of each patient's care, including our preoperative assessment, operative planning, minimizing infections, and optimizing the efficacy of our surgical interventions.
The protocol is available upon request and your neurosurgeons would be more than happy to discuss this protocol in further detail at your consultation.
Advanced Surgical and Imaging Technologies
The UCLA Functional Neurosurgery and Neurosurgical Movement Disorders Program has a long and rich history of being at the forefront of surgical technology:
- Our faculty began doing Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) surgery in Europe long before it was ever approved in the United States. Since then, our faculty have implanted over 600 DBS leads for Parkinson's disease, tremor, dystonia, pain, headaches, and many other indications.
- UCLA was among the first centers in the country to regularly use MR-guided DBS placement.
- UCLA now uses intraoperative CT so that the patient never has to leave the operating room on the day of surgery.
- UCLA was the first center in Southern California to implant the new Implantable Pulse Generators (IPG) introduced by Medtronic in 2009.
UCLA's imaging capability ensure that your surgery will be as accurate, precise, and pain-free as possible.
Our powerful 3-Tesla MRI scanner allows us to precisely visualize the parts of the brain we are targeting. In addition to the standard imaging protocols used around the world, at UCLA, we use advanced imaging techniques that allow us to better define each individual's brain anatomy. These special protocols are intended to make surgery even more precise, accurate, safer, and more effective.
Our intraoperative CT scanner makes it possible to perform the entire surgical implantation without ever having the patient leave the operating room.
These are just a few examples of innovations that keep the UCLA Functional Neurosurgery Program and the Neurosurgical Movement disorders program ahead of others.
Research and Innovation
Our program has helped advance the neurosurgical treatment of movement disorders by participating in national studies and publishing over 150 peer-reviewed articles the neurosurgical and neurological literature. Past trials have included transplantation of neural tissues and engineered cells.
Current areas of active research include:
- Treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Treatment of medically-refractory obesity
- Development of novel imaging technologies
- To improve diagnosis
- To improve surgical targeting, accuracy, and efficacy
- To improve long term management of patients with movement disorders
- Design of newer and more precise electrodes for Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS)
- Using new technologies, such as Focused Ultrasound, to treat movement disorders
- Trials for epilepsy
- And many more...
