Keith Krehbiel has damaged extra ribs than he can depend — from bike crashes to falls throughout pickleball matches. Another time, he climbed up the stairwell in his house and blacked out simply as he reached the prime.
“Falling is a common symptom of people with Parkinson’s,” he mentioned.
Krehbiel is amongst the estimated 1.1 million Americans with Parkinson’s illness, a motion dysfunction of the nervous system that worsens over time. Another 10 million people worldwide are estimated to have the illness.
Symptoms typically begin slowly, many instances starting with a tremor that’s barely noticeable in a single hand or a foot or one’s jaw. But over time, the dysfunction causes stiffness, a slowing of motion, and balancing points together with a slew of autoimmune points.
Krehbiel, a longtime enterprise and political science professor at Stanford University, has handled the illness for practically three many years — recognized in 1997 with early onset Parkinson’s at the age of 42.
“I was running and noticed my left arm didn’t move nearly as much as my right arm,” he mentioned. “About that time, I was doing something in the kitchen and my pinkie started shaking, and I didn’t know what that was about either.”
When he was recognized, he didn’t suppose it was that huge of a deal. He continued operating, biking, and bowling to keep up his way of life. “It wasn’t crushing,” he mentioned, “because I was ignorant. I didn’t know anything about Parkinson’s.”
With the help of remedy, he found out a method “to live with it.” Based on one research of individuals with early onset Parkinson’s, Krehbiel calculated he would dwell to about 55, possibly 60.
“My goal was to last long enough, so I could see my daughters graduate from high school,” he mentioned.
He shattered that purpose. But as the years glided by, his signs intensified, as did his falls, the slowing of his nervous system and the unintended effects of medicines. He felt he lived in a brain fog and was nauseous all the time. Movements that have been as soon as straightforward grew to become laborious.
“Your breathing slows, your heart rate slows,” he mentioned, describing the mixture of residing with Parkinson’s and medicine unintended effects. “Everything slows down. I stand up I get dizzy. I have to train myself to expect that.”
Krehbiel would ultimately change into the first affected person in a groundbreaking pivotal international clinical trial to obtain an adaptive deep brain stimulation (aDBS) gadget.
The gadget senses brain exercise in actual time and tailors electrical pulses accordingly, like a pacemaker for the brain that solely fires when wanted.
“I thought, well, if you’re going to be cursed with something,” Krehbiel mentioned, “you might as well try to contribute on your way out, so to speak, to put it morbidly.”
Dr. Helen Bronte-Stewart, a Stanford Medicine professor of neurology and neurological science, has spent her profession “trying to understand how the brain controls movement, what happens when it goes wrong and how we can fix it.”
Bronte-Stewart was the international lead investigator of the worldwide multicenter trial of aDBS for Parkinson’s patients — a research that resulted in FDA approval of the device, made by Medtronic, in February 2025. Time journal named the BrainSense aDBS certainly one of the “Best Inventions of 2025.”
Tens of hundreds of Parkinson’s patients have acquired conventional deep brain stimulation over the final 20 years through which leads, about the dimension of skinny strands of spaghetti, are implanted in the brain offering electrical stimulation to regulate the brain’s electrical rhythms to ease tremors and different Parkinson’s signs. The wires are connected to a small, battery-powered gadget implanted below the pores and skin of the chest.
The new gadget adjusts stimulation based mostly on brain alerts in actual time.
“Until recently, these stimulation devices delivered a one-size-fits-all train of electric pulses to the brain around the clock,” Bronte-Stewart mentioned. “They have helped some people but are a pretty blunt tool for trying to correct the brain arrythmias associated with Parkinson’s. Now, we have this adaptive technology that listens to brain activity and adjusts stimulation accordingly.”
The FDA approval, she mentioned, felt like a validation of her many years of labor.
“There’s a lot of joy in the discovery along the way,” she mentioned, “when you’re doing that hard work and you see amazing interactions between these neural signals and these highly precise motor signals as people are doing complex acts.”
In reality, she mentioned, it’s onerous to totally describe what it feels prefer to see analysis carried out in her lab over a few years come to fruition in the new gadget with it “being picked up across the world and patients are really liking it.”
“I think it’s just the beginning,” Bronte-Stewart instructed NCS. “There’s a lot more to do, but certainly the beginning is very exciting.”
Bronte-Stewart, who was named the first lady neurologist in Stanford’s division of neurology about a dozen years in the past, added, “It’s a really interesting dance to me — that science moves innovation forward, then technology catches up, then when it’s got enough evidence, regulatory approves it.”
Scott Stanslaski, a famend engineer at Medtronic who helped invent the aDBS gadget, has labored with Bronte-Stewart for greater than a dozen years.
Stanslaski mentioned she was “instrumental” in serving to kind the good public-private collaboration to help Parkinson’s patients. “I’ve had an amazing journey working with Helen,” he mentioned. “I have so much respect for her. Not everyone that we worked with was as open to the back-and-forth collaboration with industry.”
More spectacular, he mentioned, have been her interactions with the affected person pioneers who have been keen to endure exams for one thing that had by no means been performed earlier than. “She really developed strong bonds with those patients, and it was amazing to see the patients develop this sense of purpose. It was really fun to watch — to see how important those research visits were to the patients themselves.”
The aDBS gadget shouldn’t be a remedy. Bronte-Stewart calls it a “wonderful, stable, long-term therapy” with the know-how solely getting higher with the goal of slowing Parkinson’s development.
She compares the remedy breakthrough to when the earliest pacemakers couldn’t sense a particular person’s heartbeat, solely delivering one regular electrical rhythm. That was the case of deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s patients for years, till the adaptive gadget got here alongside.
“When it’s on and working,” she mentioned, “then people really do [improve]. What they say is their disease goes back at least five years.”
Krehbiel, her first affected person in the medical trial, has had his gadget in since the summer season of 2020. In the 5 years since, his hand tremor has nearly fully disappeared. He additionally has lower method down on medicines that made him groggy, a feeling of reduction after many years.
“I just felt a lot better cognitively. My brain was less foggy. I just felt good,” he mentioned. “It was just a psychologically cool feeling.”
He has additionally seen the births of three grandchildren. He nonetheless has falls and gait points when strolling, however “it sure makes life better in the sense of alleviating some of the nasty part of Parkinson’s.”
“It’s still no picnic, that’s for sure,” Krehbiel mentioned, “but it’s a lot better than it would be.”