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Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Brain-Wave Patterns Distinguish Parkinson’s Subtypes

August 27, 2018

Deep-brain stimulation can improve symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, but it does not work for all patients. Now, a paper in the August 21 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that characteristic brain waves set subtypes of PD apart, and might help clinicians improve DBS. Scientists led by Nuri Ince, University of Houston, found different oscillation patterns in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in people with tremor-dominant PD, compared with patients with mostly postural instability and gait difficulty. “We think we can use these features to personalize DBS treatments,” said first author Ilknur Telkes. “In doing so we might increase the efficacy of DBS, especially in those who receive suboptimal benefit.”

Warren Grill, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, agreed. “It was not known before that oscillatory patterns differ across symptom profiles or types of PD,” he told Alzforum. “I was really excited by the finding because I think it has important implications for future developments in DBS.” Grill was not involved in the study.

Telkes and colleagues analyzed recordings taken from microelectrodes used to guide DBS surgery. During the procedure, surgeons record activity at different depths of the brain to find an optimal place to implant electrodes. Telkes analyzed recordings taken from 24 patients, trying to find tell-tale differences.

Patients fell into two main groups based on their oscillation patterns. One group of 13 was made up of tremor-dominant (TD) patients, while the other 11 patients had primarily postural instability and gait difficulty (PIGD). In the TD patients, microelectrodes picked up a high-frequency oscillation of 200 to 260 Hz in the top 2 mm of the STN. The amplitude of that oscillation coupled strongly with the phase of the beta oscillation, which is typically in the 13–30 Hz range. Both TD and PIGD groups had faster high-frequency oscillations of 260–400 Hz at greater depths, between 2 mm and 5 mm, but these oscillations were more strongly coupled to the beta oscillations in the PIGD group

Strong Coupling, Different Areas.

In the upper substantia nigra (top panels), high-frequency oscillations coupled with beta oscillations (color bar shows strength) in TD patients (left) but not in PIGD patients (right). The opposite pattern emerged in the lower STN. [Courtesy of Telkes et al., 2018.]

Studies of other populations will be needed to confirm these findings, Telkes said. It’s not clear yet whether these data will be helpful for DBS, but they suggest that taking a patient’s symptom profile into account could help surgeons place DBS electrodes and optimally stimulate the brain, said Grill. Perhaps placing electrodes higher up in the STN in TD-PD might disrupt high frequency/beta coupling there, while placing electrodes deeper in PIGD patients would be better. Previous studies found that when levodopa and DBS disrupted coupling in the subthalamic nucleus, PD symptoms improved (López-Azcárate et al., 2010).

However, Maya Katz, University of California, San Francisco, cautioned that people with PD can fluctuate from year to year between TD and PIGD subtypes (Simuni et al., 2016). “It would be very difficult to target DBS on a biomarker that is changing as the disease progresses,” she told Alzforum. Finding the abnormal oscillations to target in DBS is important, she said, but she believes researchers should aim for something more stable.—Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib