(WISH) — Imagine one day you notice your head, hands, leg or arms starting to shake – maybe it’s just a little, but then it starts to get worse. More than 10 million people have essential tremors. It can start small, but it can end up making it difficult to eat, speak, walk and talk. Now, a new treatment is helping to stop the shaking.

Janice Pedersen has a lot to live for – 11 kids and 52 grand kids to be exact.

“Michelle, Kristin, Lynette, Todd, Laura, Stephanie, Blake …,” Janice names.

But even before grandkids, Janice noticed her hands starting to shake – that’s when she was treated with MRI-guided high-frequency focused ultrasound.

Dr. Robert Gross, MD, PhD, neurosurgeon at Emory School of Medicine explains, “Using sound waves that get through the brain and create that, sort of, thermal heating, in the area that we’re trying to negate the activity.”

Gross can now pinpoint the tiniest area in the brain causing the tremors. Using the same type of ultrasound that breaks up kidney stones and allows you to see babies in utero, this one uses a thousand ultrasound beams to ablate, or destroy, the lesions in the brain causing the tremors.

“We focus those thousand beams such that, as they’re going through, they don’t do very much heating at any particular trajectory through the brain, but they all meet at a certain point,” Gross adds.

The FDA-approved procedure is now offered all over the country and is helping people like Janice to regain control of their lives.

The treatment is performed in a single session and usually takes two to three hours. It’s currently being used for patients living with essential tremor or Parkinson’s-related tremor that’s not responding to medication. Data so far shows the effect of the procedure lasts up to five years or longer.

This story was created from a script aired on WISH-TV. Health Spotlight is presented by Community Health Network.