New treatment for Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease is a common neurological condition that affects many people in old age. Physicists and neurologists have been working together for some time to find an effective treatment for the disease, but until now the only alternative to drug therapy has involved applying a continuous electrical signal to the affected part of the brain. Now Peter Tass of the Institute of Medicine at the Research Centre Julich in Germany has used the methods of nonlinear dynamics to show that the disease could be treated by applying double pulses only occasionally to the brain (P Tass 2001 Europhys. Lett. 53 15). This would result in a less severe treatment of the disease.