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Non-invasive treatment for Parkinson's disease studied at Delray Medical Center
Delray Medical Center has been in the local news for offering a treatment that sounds almost too good to be true: a way to quiet the worst movement symptoms of Parkinson's disease using focused sound waves, with no scalpel, no implanted device, and a trip home the same day. I read the actual trial behind the story, published in July in The Lancet Neurology, because the headline version and the data usually differ. They do here, and in a way I think patients should know about. Treating one side of the brain worked well and was remarkably safe. Treating the second side, months later, added very little on top of that while raising the odds of lasting trouble with speech and walking from 2 percent to 25 percent.
Key Findings & Takeaways
- What the Treatment Is: More than a thousand beams of ultrasound pass through the skull from different angles and meet at a single target deep in the brain. Only where they converge is there enough energy to heat and interrupt the tissue driving the symptoms. An MRI maps the target and watches the temperature, so the team can test at low power, check how the patient responds, and adjust before making the change permanent. Nothing is cut open and nothing is left behind.
- What "Motor Complications" Actually Means: This trial was not mainly about tremor. It enrolled 54 people whose Parkinson's medication had started failing them in two specific ways: dyskinesia, the involuntary writhing and fidgeting movements the medication itself can cause, and "off" time, the stretches when a dose wears off and the stiffness and slowness come back.
- One Side of the Brain Worked Well: After treating the side causing the worst symptoms, movement scores on that side improved by 53 percent and the score for medication-related complications dropped by 67 percent. The share of patients with any dyskinesia fell from half to under one in five. At six months, exactly one of the 54 patients had a lasting side effect of any consequence, which is 2 percent.
- The Second Side Added Surprisingly Little: Forty of those patients went on to have the other side treated at least six months later. Measured against where they already stood after the first treatment, the additional gain was about 19 percent. On the motor-complications score, the group had gone from 12.0 at the start to 4.1 after one side, and then only to 3.9 after the second. Nearly all of the benefit had already been won.
- And the Second Side Carried Real Risk: A year after the second treatment, 10 of those 40 patients, or 25 percent, still had moderate or severe problems, mostly affecting speech, walking, and balance. One person lost the ability to speak clearly and still had not recovered twelve months later. After one side alone, that figure was 2 percent.
- What the Patients Themselves Said: This is the number that stayed with me. After the first treatment, 93 percent said they would do it again. After the second, only 65 percent would, and just 62 percent felt the good outweighed the bad.
- The Trade-Off Against Deep Brain Stimulation: Deep brain stimulation places electrodes that can be adjusted, turned down, or taken out. Focused ultrasound destroys a small piece of tissue permanently. That is both its appeal, since there is no device to maintain and no battery to replace, and its risk, since there is nothing to undo. The trial's authors concluded that one-sided treatment is effective and safe, and that two-sided treatment "demands rigorous patient selection and counselling regarding cumulative risks."
- Credit Where It's Due: The paper's first author is Dr. Arif Dalvi in Boynton Beach, and Dr. Lloyd Zucker in Delray Beach is among the co-authors. Both are colleagues I know well and think highly of. Work done here helped drive the FDA's approval of the staged bilateral procedure in July 2025. I'll admit to some local pride that a trial of this quality, in one of the best neurology journals in the world, came out of our corner of South Florida rather than somewhere we would only read about.
- And the Real Compliment: The most impressive thing about this paper is what it chose to report. These are physicians who offer this procedure, and they published a result arguing for doing less of it, in plain language, in a major journal, with the disappointing number stated as plainly as the good one. That is what good medicine looks like. It is also why I trust the figures above more than I would trust a press release.
- Full Disclosure: The trial was funded by Insightec, which makes the device, though the paper states the academic authors led the analysis and wrote the manuscript. I know and count as friends several of the people involved, and I care for patients at Delray Medical Center, which offers this procedure. I don't perform it, I have no financial interest in it, and nobody asked me to write this.
- If This Sounds Like Someone You Love: The next step is a movement disorders neurologist, not a blog post. Worth knowing going in: not everyone is a candidate. Of the 84 people who volunteered for this trial, 30 were screened out, several because their skull did not transmit the ultrasound well enough to reach the target.
Reference Source: WPBF 25 News, On the Record: Delray Medical Center details non-invasive procedure for Parkinson's disease
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