Clinical trials are underway for a neural implant to monitor brain pressure in those living with hydrocephalus.
The condition causes fluid to build up in the brain which, if untreated, can be fatal.
Patients can be born with hydrocephalus or develop it later in life.
It is typically treated with a small tube, called a shunt, implanted under the skin which drains fluid from the brain into the stomach.
However, shunts had a 50 percent chance of failure in the first two years.
To tackle this, researchers at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute and Kitea Health developed an implant to measure pressure in the brain using an external, wireless wand.
The implant is only two by three millimetres, and weighs 0.3 of a gram.
Clinical trials in adults are about 50 percent complete, and trials on children have begun.
It is a world first, the smallest brain implant ever developed, as well as the first implantable medical device developed in New Zealand.
Ah, the stories in the business section always have better details. I used to love reading the business section of newspapers, but that was many moons ago.
Interesting the trial is planned to have 150 people from across NZ. Seems it’s pretty common. This says 100 kids are diagnosed every year.
Also, there’s a photo of someone holding the implant. Surely that thing is closer to 1cm long than the 2mmx3mm in the RNZ article?
Just checked and it’s 2 cm. News articles are vague, but according to the scientists involved with it, it measures 2mm x 3mm x 20mm. It’s going to save lives though.
I used to read the business section too, for the same reason.
Ah that makes more sense. The original article missed the third dimension.
It sounds like it won’t just save lives but also prevent a lot of expensive tests since the symptoms in kids are similar to common illness (e.g. vomiting) so now parents have a way to check without going to the hospital. Plus they don’t have to do an extra surgery, they are just putting them in when they put the shunt in.
Definitely. It feels like it will be a turning point in how it is managed, especially if health funders figure out that it will cut costs and actually fund it.
A bunch of brain illnesses/injuries trigger sickness responses, it’s a problem for sure. The warning signs for this in adults sound like common problems too (headaches, poor balance, concentration problems, needing to wee a lot). Being able to wave a “wand” and see if your shunt is working sounds like magic!
Haha it pretty much is magic!
One of the things I was reading said that the condition is common(er) in older people and often mistaken for dementia, but unlike dementia there is treatment for this and they get their brain function back.
Oh yikes not another one. Honestly thinking about getting a tattooed list on my forearm of the “mistaken for dementia” conditions when I hit 70, so that I can try to get checked for them instead of being thrown into a dementia ward.
Yeah scary stuff, and it makes you wonder if all that misdiagnosis is impacting on research by throwing out the results.
Didn’t think of that - it might be, since formal dementia diagnoses are symptom based not biomarker based.
This is what’s happening at the moment with long covid studies to some extent because it’s not just one illness, it’s a raft of illnesses that have been caused by the same virus.