Mount Sinai findings address unmet need for collecting living human brain tissue to advance medical research
Obtaining prefrontal cortex biopsies during deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery in living patients does not increase the risk of adverse events or cognitive decline compared to standard DBS procedures that don’t involve biopsies, a team of clinical research scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has demonstrated.
The study findings, published online September 3 in Neurosurgery, the official publication of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons, establish the safety of an approach that allows researchers to collect valuable living human brain tissue during planned neurosurgical procedures, addressing a critical barrier in neuroscience research while maintaining patient safety. Most studies of how the brain works at the molecular level have been performed using samples from deceased patients because of the lack of safe approaches to sampling the living human brain.