olympics

Brainstem implant turns off dad's 8 years of Parkinson's tremors
By John Henderson
The Denver Post
Connie Carpenter-Phinney could tell the difference the minute she saw her husband, Davis Phinney. She immediately saw the man she married in 1983, not the man who was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson's disease eight years ago.

On April 25, after neurosurgeons in Palo Alto, Calif., dialed up the settings for a device they had surgically implanted in his brainstem three weeks earlier, Carpenter-Phinney saw her husband's maddening tremors stop.

"This mask you had for a number of years," she told him, "just lifted."

Phinney, 48, hasn't received a completely clean bill of health. He's not biking up any Category 1 peaks in the Pyrenees anytime soon. But the Boulder High grad who won a U.S.-record 328 bike races and an Olympic bronze medal has won a major battle over a crippling disease.



http://www.denverpost.com/boulder/ci_9213666