Medical miracle: Doctors perform awake brain surgery on musician to treat guitarist¡¯s dystonia, check symptoms

Can you imagine being awake the whole time during a surgery? Well, in yet another case of creating a medical miracle, a team of doctors successfully conducted a brain surgery on an awake patient who was suffering from 'guitarist dystonia'.

Joseph D'Souza, a 65-year-old patient suffering from focal dystonia, underwent groundbreaking awake brain surgery to treat the condition that caused his fingers to involuntarily curl. To conduct the meticulous procedure, the doctors used local anaesthesia to ensure that the patient stayed conscious, drilled into Joseph's skull and inserted a probe 10 centimetres deep into his brain.

According to Dr. Sharan Srinivasan, stereotactic and functional neurosurgeon, PRS Neurosciences, Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain Hospital (BMJH), doctors prefer that patients with guitarist dystonia perform music while being operated on. This helps the surgeons locate the troubled circuit inside the brain, which does not show up in the MRIs.

For Joseph, music was life, and he learnt to play the guitar at the age of six; since then, he has taken it as a profession; however, his fate had different plans for him. He developed the guitarist¡¯s dystonia, a type of task-specific focal hand dystonia (TSFHD), and the condition made it difficult for him to play simple basic chords. But what is a guitarist¡¯s dystonia?

What is a guitarist¡¯s dystonia?

Guitarist¡¯s dystonia is also known as musician's dystonia (MD), which is a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions. This makes it difficult for the patients to play the guitar.

According to the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation, professional musicians are susceptible to a number of occupational conditions, including task-specific focal dystonia. Dystonia is a neurological condition that is characterised by involuntary muscle contractions.

Experts estimate that around 1 to 2% of professional musicians are affected by dystonia. Among them, the major number of patients are musicians living with symptoms which remain unidentified.

Symptoms of Guitarist¡¯s Dystonia

Some of the most affected musicians describe their symptoms in musical terms. They include:

• Subtle loss of control in fast passages
• Lack of precision
• Curling of fingers
• Fingers ¡°sticking¡± to keys
• Involuntary flexion of bowing thumb in strings
• Tremors in fingers