Judy Luigjes

Deep Brain Stimulation in Chronic Treatment refractory Drug Dependence: A Pilot Study

This research project aims to establish the feasibility, safety, and potential efficacy of NAc DBS in 8 patients with a chronic, treatment refractory heroin and/or cocaine addiction. Additionally the functional effects of DBS will be explored in several ways 1) we will look at changes in brain activation patterns in response to specific tasks by means of functional MRI 2) we will look at the striatal D2 binding using [123I]IBZM SPECT 3) we will look at neuropsychological functioning using cognitive tasks. Changes found in these three areas will be associated with clinical outcome parameters.