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Can a Brain Implant Treat Addiction? Some experts tout deep brain stimulation as a lifeline for people struggling with opioid use. Others question the hype.

Some experts tout deep brain stimulation as a lifeline for people struggling with opioid use. Others question the hype

In clinical trials dating back to the 1980s, DBS targeting the thalamus, the subthalamic nucleus and other regions embedded beneath the cerebral cortex—in the so-called deep brain—have shown an ability to provide speedy and substantial relief from a number of movement disorders. Over the last few decades, researchers such as neurosurgeon Casey Halpern of the University of Pennsylvania, who led Max’s 2019 surgery, have sought to deploy DBS to treat a broader range of mental health conditions that appear to be rooted in the brain’s reward processing mechanisms, including opioid use disorder. DBS “really shouldn’t be a first-line treatment,” said the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Heinsbroek, who instead sees the procedure as a last-ditch method to be used when it is “perhaps the only way to prevent somebody from passing away by overdose.” He notes that, although the surgery is generally considered safe, placing foreign objects in the brain does carry risks of inflammation, scarring and other side effects.

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