High-frequency Synchronization of Neuronal Activity in the Subthalamic Nucleus of Parkinsonian Patients with Limb Tremor

By R. Levy, W. Hutchison, A. Lozano, J. Dostrovsky. Journal of Neuroscience, 2000

653 citations recorded by the source corpus.

It has been hypothesized that in Parkinson's disease (PD) there is increased synchronization of neuronal firing in the basal ganglia. This study examines the discharge activity of 121 pairs of subthalamic nucleus (STN) neurons in nine PD patients undergoing functional stereotactic mapping. Four patients had a previous pallidotomy. A double microelectrode setup was used to simultaneously record from two neurons separated by distances as small as 250 μm. In the six patients who had limb tremor during the recording session (n = 76 pairs), the discharge pattern of 12 pairs of tremor cells (TCs) was found to be coherent at the frequency of the limb tremor. Both in-phase and out-of-phase relationships were observed between TCs. Interestingly, in these six patients, 63/129 single neurons displayed 15–30 Hz oscillations, whereas 36/76 pairs were coherent in this frequency range. Although the oscillatory frequencies were variable between patients, they were highly clustered within a patient. The phase difference between these pairs was found to be close to 0. High-frequency synchronization was observed during periods of limb tremor as well as during intermittent periods with no apparent limb tremor. In contrast, in the three patients without limb tremor during the recording session, only 1/84 neurons had high-frequency oscillatory activity, and no TCs or synchronous high-frequency oscillatory activity was observed (n = 45 pairs). These findings demonstrate that in PD patients with limb tremor, many STN neurons display high-frequency oscillations with a high degree of in-phase synchrony. The results suggest that high-frequency synchronized oscillatory activity may be associated with the pathology that gives rise to tremor in PD patients.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Neurology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/997f3b424259760a8fca88a242183c355e73e632

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Citations in the corpus

Oscillations in the Basal Ganglia: The good, the bad, and the unexpected (2005, background): “…oscillating at tremor frequency tend to vary their phase relationships with one another over time, so that spectral analysis methods that average LFPs over time would tend to underestimate the strength of such synchronized activity when it occurs (Hurtado et al., 1999, 2004; Levy et al., 2000 ).”
Event-related beta desynchronization in human subthalamic nucleus correlates with motor performance. (2004, background): “In the case of the beta activity in the basal ganglia, it seems highly likely that this is increased in parkinsonism (Nini et al., 1995; Levy et al., 2000), although a study in an epileptic patient suggested that it may also be present in non- parkinsonian subjects and show reactivity with…”
Normal and pathological oscillatory communication in the brain (2005, background): “Studies of neuronal firing in both human patients and animal models of Parkinson's disease have provided evidence of an increase in oscillatory activity in the globus pallidus externus (GPe), the GPi and the ST”
Reduction in subthalamic 8–35 Hz oscillatory activity correlates with clinical improvement in Parkinson's disease (2006, background): “Synchronization at 4–8 Hz is, however, commonly found in microelectrode recordings of pairs of neurons in parkinsonian humans and monkeys, and may positively correlate with tremor (Bergman et al., 1994; Raz et al., 1996; Levy et al., 2000).”
Hold your horses: A dynamic computational role for the subthalamic nucleus in decision making (2006, positive): “…simulations, dopamine depletion produced emergent oscillatory activity in the STN and BG output nuclei; these oscillations are reliably observed in DAdepleted animals and humans and are thought to be the source of Parkinson's tremor (Bergman et al., 1994, 1998; Levy et al., 2000; Raz et al., 2000).”