Objective: To test if the β oscillations of subthalamic nucleus (STN) local field potential (LFP) in Chinese advanced Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients are similar with those of US patient population.

Background: STN Deep brain stimulating (DBS) is effective for treating PD patients. Evidences have demonstrated that the β band (11-30 Hz) activity are associated with the patient disease severity with respect to motor deficits. Efforts have been made to utilize this biomarker in the development of next-generation closed-loop DBS therapies which have yielded promising results. However, most of the data to date has come from patient populations in USA and Europe. We report the β activity characteristics of a Chinese cohort.

Methods: Bipolar LFPs were recorded intraoperatively using a standard EEG system (MicroMed SD64, Italy) from the inserted DBS leads (Medtronic 3389) when being inserted in 11 subjects undergoing the DBS surgery. The sampling frequency was 256 Hz. The recording started from 2mm above to 2mm below the target in descending steps of 2mm, each step for 60 seconds while the subjects were at rest. The Bipolar LFPs, E0-E1 (E0 is the most caudal of the 4 contacts) were filtered (0.5 – 100Hz, Butterworth, order = 5) and FFT analyzed (welch, hamming window, 1 sec. segment, 0.5 overlap). The amplitude of the highest β peak of the FFT from all 4 steps was selected for the patient for statistical analyses.

Results: The data from 2 subjects were excluded because of bad recording. All remaining 9 subjects showed pronounced β activities, of which 8 had discrete peak frequency (PF) and one showed high amplitude in plateau form. Of the 8 subjects with clear β peak(s), 5 had a single peak and 3 had double peaks. The average β PF of the 8 subjects (the peak with higher amplitude was selected in case of double peak) was 22.9 ±3.8Hz (mean ± SD), ranging from 18.0 to 29.0 Hz with an average amplitude of 2.74±1.88 µVRMS. The results were compared indirectly with those from some previous publications. A study of 7 advanced PD in USA [1] showed β PF around 20 Hz in average during all three phases, Intra-operatively, 3 weeks and 3+years following the initial implant with amplitude from 0.7 to 1.3 µV (RMS); another intra-operative LFP recordings from 74 PD patients in USA [2] reported the 51.2% of β PF lay in low β range (13–20 Hz), 33.6% in high β range (21–35 Hz), and15.2% in alpha range (8–12 Hz).

Conclusions: The β characteristics from the presented Chinese cohort are consistent with those from US population.

References: 1. Abosch A. et al Long-term Recordings of Local Field Potentials from Implanted Deep Brain Stimulation Electrodes. Neurosurgery. 2012 Oct;71(4):804-14. 2. Shreve LA, et al. Subthalamic oscillations and phase amplitude coupling are greater in the more affected hemisphere in Parkinson’s disease. Clin Neurophysiol. 2017.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/subthalamic-nucleus-local-field-potential-beta-activity-in-chinese-advanced-pd-patients/