Electricity Is the New Medical Miracle
Stimulating the vagus nerve can relieve arthritis, Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory conditions—perhaps someday even Alzheimer’s disease.
July 22, 2022
Stimulating the vagus nerve can relieve arthritis, Crohn’s disease and other inflammatory conditions—perhaps someday even Alzheimer’s disease.
Kelly Owens was a medical mystery, her teens and 20s blighted by a cascade of seemingly unrelated health problems that left her debilitated. For a decade and a half she was put on one medication after another—22 in all—to little effect. Then electricity saved her.
“I didn’t even remember how ‘healthy’ felt, since it had been 15 years,” Ms. Owens, 33, says. Now she and her husband are talking about having a child, something she had thought impossible. She credits Kevin Tracey, an innovative neurosurgeon she found through Facebook.
Ms. Owens was an athletic 13-year-old when she twisted her ankle tap-dancing. A few weeks later, her ankle was still swollen and she began experiencing severe nausea and diarrhea. A year or two later, her other ankle swelled up, though she’d never injured it. Then her knees grew inflamed.
After a colonoscopy and endoscopy, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel condition. Blood tests and a physical examination revealed spondyloarthropathy arthritis, which attacked her spine, joints and organs. She developed blood clots and skin ulcers. By the time she finished college, she says, there wasn’t a joint in her body that didn’t hurt. Her myriad ailments made it difficult to walk and forced her to quit her job as a teacher. To control her joint inflammation, she was prescribed steroids, which made her bones as brittle as a 70-year-old woman’s.
She was 25 when she stumbled on a Facebook video of Dr. Tracey, CEO of the Manhasset, N.Y.-based Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research, discussing how electricity could replace medication. Dr. Tracey, 64, pioneered research showing that electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve—the nervous-system “motherboard” that originates at the back of the neck, which connects the brain to the rest of the body—could suppress inflammation that causes chronic diseases such as Crohn’s and rheumatoid arthritis.
She enrolled in a vagus-nerve stimulation trial by SetPoint Medical, a California-based biotech startup that Dr. Tracey co-founded in 2007. With financial help from family and friends, she and her husband moved to Amsterdam, one of the sites where the trial took place. The trial’s principal investigator was Geert D’Haens, a global expert in inflammatory bowel disease based at the Amsterdam University Medical Center.
SetPoint implanted a pacemaker-sized device in her chest cavity that sends stimulation to electrodes surgically placed on her vagus nerve. Her symptoms began to improve within weeks. Soon she was able not only to walk but to run. Two months after the device was implanted, doctors deemed her in clinical remission. Her ailments have remained at bay, and her doctors weaned her from steroids.
Scientists have long known that the vagus nerve carries signals between the brain and internal organs that regulate physiological processes such as digestion, breathing and heart rate. When you exercise, for instance, your heart speeds up. Then your brain sends a signal via the vagus nerve directing your heart to slow down so it doesn’t beat out of control.
Dr. Tracey’s breakthrough two decades ago was the discovery that the brain also controls the immune system through the vagus nerve. By using electrical stimulation to hack into neural networks, it’s possible to regulate the immune response and perhaps someday cure inflammatory conditions such as multiple sclerosis, lupus and even Alzheimer’s disease.
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Some drugs also work by chemically stimulating the vagus nerve and may carry potential to treat conditions other than those for which they were originally developed. Dr. Tracey conducted a small trial that found famotidine (also known by the brand name Pepcid) can reduce the duration of acute Covid in patients with mild to moderate symptoms by activating the vagus nerve and suppressing the cytokine storm.
Healthy behaviors like exercise and meditation can also stimulate the vagus nerve, Dr. Tracey says, but they may not help patients whose nerve fibers are damaged or who have a genetic predisposition. The latter might have caused Ms. Owens’s ailments.
Dr. Tracey is reluctant to say she’s cured: “She might be. We don’t know. How do you know if she’s cured? No one wants to turn the device off.” But she feels like a normal, healthy 33-year-old, and she hopes her story will inspire others with similar conditions: “Patients really need to have hope.”
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