Progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) is a distinctive form of neurodegenerative disease which affects the brainstem and basal ganglia. Patients present supranuclear ophthalmoplegia, postural instability and mild dementia. PSP is defined neuropathologically by the accumulation of neurofibrillary tangles in the subthalamic nucleus, pallidum, red nucleus, substantia nigra, striatum, pontine tegmen...

BACKGROUND Hemiballism/hemichorea commonly occurs as a result of a lesion in the subthalamic region. CASE REPORT A 38-year-old male with Parkinson's disease developed intractable hemiballism in his left extremities due to a small lesion that was located adjacent to the right deep brain stimulation (DBS) lead, 10 months after bilateral subthalamic nucleus (STN)-DBS placement. He underwent a ri...

OBJECTIVE Recent studies of functional brain imaging have shown the involvement of the basal ganglia in executive processes such as planning and set-shifting. However, the specific contributions of the striatum in those processes remain unknown. This study aimed to test the hypothesis that the caudate nucleus is primarily involved in the preparation of a novel action and not in set-shifting per...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is an effective tool for the treatment of advanced Parkinson's disease. The mechanism by which STN DBS elicits its beneficial effect, however, remains unclear. We previously reported STN stimulation increased the rate and produced a more regular and periodic pattern of neuronal activity in the internal segment of the globus pallidus ...

We report on the pathological findings in the brains of 8 Parkinson's disease patients treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the thalamic ventral intermediate nucleus (6 cases) and subthalamic nucleus (2 cases). DBS was performed continuously for up to 70 months. All brains showed well-preserved neural parenchyma and only mild gliosis around the lead track compatible with reactive change...

The symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (a.o.: tremor, rigidity) can be suppressed by electrical stimulation of the basal ganglia [1]. The most common target nucleus of this so called Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is the subthalamic nucleus (STN). Good clinical results are obtained by the application of pulses of 200 μs, 1-3 V amplitude at a constant rate of about 130 Hz. However, the mechanism(s) r...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether subthalamic nucleotomy produces adverse cognitive effects in patients with Parkinson's disease. METHOD Twelve patients with Parkinson's disease underwent stereotactic surgery to the subthalamic nucleus. Presurgical and postsurgical neuropsychological assessment of attention, memory, executive function, language, and verbal intellect were undertaken with a battery...

deep brain stimulation (dbs) is a neurosurgical procedure that enables brain structures to be stimulated electrically by a pacemaker implanted under the skin. in the 1980s, over a decade after its first use in pain, implantable dbs of the thalamus was performed to suppress tremor in parkinson’s disease (pd) refractory to drug treatments. primate-based research soon afterwards identified the sub...

See Klockgether (doi:10.1093/awv253) for a scientific commentary on this article.The spinocerebellar ataxias types 2 (SCA2) and 3 (SCA3) are autosomal dominantly inherited cerebellar ataxias which are caused by CAG trinucleotide repeat expansions in the coding regions of the disease-specific genes. Although previous post-mortem studies repeatedly revealed a consistent neurodegeneration of the d...