Newswise — Hermitage resident Stephen Purcell, 70, has had Parkinson’s disease for a long time. He knew something was wrong as far back as 2008. He had been diagnosed at Summit Medical Center in Hermitage and then came to Vanderbilt University Medical Center for a second opinion.
Shortly after, there was a family reunion on his wife Patsy’s side, and her cousin was a neurologist at Mayo Clinic. She asked her if she could talk to her about what she had observed from watching Stephen at the party. “She said, ‘I know he has Parkinson’s.
’ And this was the first time I met her,” Purcell said. “She could tell by the way I carried myself and my lack of expression. It was amazing that she knew.
The one thing that concerned me most about it was that the kind of accepted mortality back then was that people would survive maybe 10 years.” In 2008 at VUMC there were a group of doctors trying something unheard of on a handful of patients who signed up for their study. Half would receive deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery in attempt to slow the progression of their early-stage Parkinson’s disease, and the others would not.
Some who received the surgery did very well, and others, for some reason, didn’t have the same benefits. With Purcell, VUMC surgeon Peter Konrad, MD, hit what VUMC researchers later found is an exceptional “sweet spot” for placing DBS-leads in his brain. “He and his wife are wonderful,” said his neurologist Fenna Phibbs , MD, associate pr.
