How does DBS work?

While deep brain stimulation is a successful symptomatic treatment of Parkinson’s disease, its mechanisms are still not understood. To tackle this question, we have developed our own methods and implemented methods from different fields to be used with electrophysiological data (Florin et al. 2010a; Kandemir et al. 2020; Sure et al. 2022). Employing Granger causality-based methods, we identified that the efficacy of deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus could, at least in part, result from a blockade of pathological afferent input (for example Florin et al., 2016). Combining whole-head MEG recordings with LFP recordings of the STN, we, for the first time, implemented the neural event-triggered (NET) approach for MEG recordings. The direct analysis of the interaction between activity in the STN and the cortex revealed the emergence of dynamic cortical networks related to STN beta-bursts in PD (Sure et al., 2022), indicating the relevance of beta bursts for information processing.

E. Florin, J. Gross, J. Pfeifer, G.R. Fink, L. Timmermann (2010): The effect of filtering on Granger causality derived multivariate causality measures. NeuroImage, 50(2): 577-588.

E. Florin, J. Pfeifer, V. Visser-Vandewalle, A. Schnitzler, L. Timmermann (2016): Parkinson subtype-specific Granger-causal coupling and coherence frequency in the subthalamic area, Neuroscience, 332: 170-180.

A.L. Kandemir, V. Litvak, E. Florin (2020): The comparative performance of DBS artefact rejection methods for MEG recordings, NeuroImage, 219: 117057.

M. Sure, J. Vesper, A. Schnitzler, E. Florin (2022): Cortical network formation based on subthalamic beta bursts in Parkinson’s disease, NeuroImage, 263:119619.