[New indications for deep brain stimulation: ethical criteria for research and therapy]

The applications of deep brain stimulation (DBS) are rapidly increasing and now include a large variety of neurological and psychiatric diseases, such as depression, obsessive compulsive disorders, addiction, Alzheimer's disease, anorexia nervosa and rare movement disorders. These new applications confer a huge therapeutic potential in diseases for which often no treatment exists or which are refractory to existing therapies. This spread of applications, however, implies ethical problems in several domains: clinical use, research and presentation in the media and public. Thus, a systematic ethical analysis is needed to inform and guide this process. In this article we identify ethical problems involved in research and clinical use of novel DBS applications, suggest criteria and distinctions for structuring the ethical analysis, and articulate ethical demands for DBS research of novel applications.