(Chief reporter Shi Jie) 20-year-old Xiao Zhou girl suffered from Parkinson’s disease for nearly 10 years, away from drugs, she said she had reached a serious point “to eat to mother feed, also need help to dress”. Last month, the neurosurgery department of Huashan Hospital of Fudan University performed a free deep brain electrical stimulation (commonly known as “brain pacemaker”) implantation surgery for her. This is the first case of public welfare surgery completed by Huashan Hospital, the designated hospital for the project, after the “Tune Up Life” charity project initiated by China Charity Federation settled in Shencheng. The organizers said today that the “Brighten Up Your Life” project aims to help patients with chronic neurological diseases in special need, and improve their quality of life through the cooperation of corporate donations and surgeries in first-class medical institutions. According to Professor Pan Li, the chief surgeon of Fudan University’s Huashan Hospital Neurosurgery Center, the total number of Parkinson’s patients in China is more than 2 million, with a prevalence rate of 1 percent among people over 55 years old. What is particularly noteworthy is that the age of onset of Parkinson’s has been trending younger in recent years, with patients under the age of 40 estimated to have accounted for about 10% of the total number of patients. These younger patients have a longer disease duration and suffer greater losses due to incapacity, often imposing a greater emotional and financial burden on society and families. “Both young and older Parkinson’s patients mostly choose medication to control their disease at the beginning of the disease, but as the disease progresses, the amount of medication required rises, the effect may be discounted, and the financial burden on the family becomes increasingly heavy, and brain pacemaker therapy provides them with another option.” Pan Li emphasized. Pacemaker therapy is a surgically implanted electrode in the brain that delivers electrical impulses to the relevant nuclei that control movement, thereby regulating abnormal neural electrical activity and significantly improving the symptoms of slowed or dysfunctional movements, muscle stiffness and tremor in Parkinson’s patients, as well as significantly reducing the amount of medication and its side effects. To date, this approach has benefited 100,000 Parkinson’s disease patients worldwide, with about 5,000 successful cases in China. The vast majority of patients have experienced overall improvement in their motor symptoms and can even return to work after receiving this therapy. In the case of Miss Zhou, for example, she is now visually indistinguishable from a normal person, and because the amount of medication she needs to take has decreased, the resulting costs have been greatly reduced. Relying on a solid team of leading neurologists and neurosurgeons, under the leadership of academician Zhou Liangfu, Huashan Hospital has made pioneering progress in the field of functional neurological diseases that are difficult to be cured by drugs, including intractable epilepsy, trigeminal neuralgia, facial spasm, lingual-pharyngeal neuralgia, Parkinson’s disease, pediatric cerebral palsy, etc. In the past 9 years, Fudan University Functional Neurosurgery Center has been established, and the volume, success rate and efficiency of various functional neurosurgery treatments have reached the top level in the industry in China, and it has also taken a place in the international industry. The “Brighten Up Your Life” charity project initiated by China Charity Federation was responded by Medtronic, which pledged to donate medical supplies such as brain pacemakers for primary Parkinson’s disease treatment, worth more than 3.5 million yuan, to subsidize poor patients in need of treatment.