SUPPORT-PD Philippines Trip

Drs. Fernandez, Foote, Rodriguez and Okun traveled to the Philippines in late July as part of the Surgical UF-Philippines Pilot OutReach and Training for Parkinson Disease (SUPPORT-PD). The project was a collaboration with the Philippine Movement Disorder Surgery Center (PhilMove), the Philippine Neurological Association and the Movement Disorder Society of the Philippines. Dr. Fernandez, a Philippines native, worked with the Filipino doctors to arrange the trip. The Philippines currently has about 1 million people with Parkinson Disease and that number continiues to grow.

Educational seminars were presented on who are appropriate candidates for DBS, non-motor symptoms of PD, Parkinson medications, and surgical techniques. Neurologists, neurosurgeons and other health care professtionals attended these sessions.

Two patients whom the Philippines team had picked for the occasion received deep brain stimulation surgery towarrd the end of the trip. The procedures were performed by the PhilMove team while the UF team obeserved and advised.

The UF team came home from a long and rewarding trip and would have to wait to see how the patients did. A month later, the batteries (or implantable pulse generators) were implanted.

Initial programming was then performed during a Skype internet video conference between the PhilMove team and the UFMDC team. For the first patient, the UF team communicated with the PhilMove team from Dr. Okun's house. For the second, the teleconference occured during the weekly UFMDC multidisciplinary conference in the Brain Institute. Each session took about an hour to try each of the stimulating contacts and test thresholds. Both patients had significant benefit from their very first programming session and seemed quite happy with the results.