Low-frequency subthalamic oscillations increase after deep brain stimulation in Parkinson's disease

This work is the second of a series of papers in which we investigated the neurophysiological basis of deep brain stimulation (DBS) clinical efficacy using post-operative local field potential (LFP) recordings from DBS electrodes implanted in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in patients with Parkinson's disease. We found that low-frequency (1–1.5 Hz) oscillations in LFP recordings from the STN of patients with Parkinson's disease dramatically increase after DBS of the STN itself (log power change = 0.93 ± 0.62; Wilcoxon: p = 0.0002, n = 13), slowly decaying to baseline levels after turning DBS off. The DBS-induced increase of low-frequency LFP oscillations is highly reproducible and appears only after the delivery of DBS for a time long enough to induce clinical improvement. This increase of low-frequency LFP oscillations could reflect stimulation-induced modulation of network activity or could represent changes of the electrochemical properties at the brain–electrode interface.