“My willpower is weak.” Chinese drug user who tried many addiction treatments turns to experimental brain surgery.
Bloodied white mesh covers the head of a methamphetamine user named Yan on Monday, Oct. 29, 2018, three days after he had a deep brain stimulation device implanted as part of a clinical trial at Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai, China. The hope is that DBS will extinguish his addiction, quite literally, with the flip of a switch. Critics say such human experiments are premature and risky, but U.S.
The treatment — deep brain stimulation — has long been used for movement disorders like Parkinson’s. Now, the first clinical trial of DBS for methamphetamine addiction is being conducted at Shanghai’s Ruijin Hospital, along with parallel trials for opioid addiction. And this troubled man is the very first patient.
There are eight registered DBS clinical trials for drug addiction being conducted in the world, according to a U.S. National Institutes of Health database. Six are in China. Smoking made Yan feel faint and slightly unhinged. Later, he found meth brought crystalline focus to his mind, which he directed at one thing: Cards. Every time Yan smoked, he gambled. And every time he gambled, he lost — all told, around $150,000 since he started using drugs, he estimated.Yan checked into a hospital for detox, moved to another town to get away from bad influences, took Chinese traditional medicine. But he relapsed every time. “My willpower is weak,” he said.
DBS builds on that history. But unlike lesioning, which irreversibly kills brain cells, the devices allow brain interventions that are — in theory — reversible. The technology has opened a fresh field of human experimentation globally. “It would be fantastic if there were something where we could flip a switch, but it’s probably fanciful at this stage,” said Adrian Carter, who heads the neuroscience and society group at Monash University in Melbourne. “There’s a lot of risks that go with promoting that idea.”
The body count has added urgency to efforts to find new, more effective treatments for addiction. While doctors in the U.S. are interested in using DBS for addiction, work funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health is still focused on experiments in animals, not people.
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