Breaking the Ultrasound Barrier to Fight Disease

May 29, 2019 — When David Schorr was 56, the then-mortgage consultant in Columbus, OH, noticed some changes in his memory and thinking. Three years later, the 59-year-old searches for the words to describe it. “It wasn’t sudden, but over time, I knew in my mind that something was different. I wasn’t able to manage some of the stuff that I had been doing before.” He speaks slowly and carefully. “I found that people were seeing what was going on with me. As that went on, it came to a head. I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.” David Schorr and his wife, Kim, went to the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center for treatment. David Schorr got medications to ease some of the symptoms. But without medicines to cure or slow the progress of the disease, their only other option was experimental treatments. “They asked us from the beginning if we were interested in clinical trials ,” says Kim Schorr. This year, they found a match. But the treatment, Kim says, sounded intense. Researchers would shave David Schorr’s head, then use ultrasound waves to try to open his blood-brain barrier — that’s the shield made of blood vessels that protects the brain from any germs or other threats that may be circulating in the bloodstream. The blood-brain barrier mostly keeps the brain healthy by keeping infection out. But when a disease like Alzheimer’s is in the brain, that barrier can prevent helpful medicine from getting in. Ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier in Alzheimer’s disease is the latest in the growing field of focused ultrasound. Most people think of ultrasound as a way to take fuzzy black-and-white pictures of a fetus in the womb. But with focused ultrasound, doctors use the sound waves to actively treat a condition rather than […]

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