Cognitive declines after unilateral deep brain stimulation surgery in Parkinson's disease: a controlled study using Reliable Change, part II.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery, an effective treatment for medication-refractory Parkinson's disease (PD), may also lead to selective cognitive declines. In this continuation of a report by Zahodne et al. (2009), we compare cognitive performance of 24 PD patients who underwent unilateral implantation of the globus pallidus internal segment (GPi) or subthalamic nucleus (STN) to that of 19 PD controls. We used group statistical comparisons as well as Reliable Change Indexes (RCIs) to examine performance on measures of memory, processing speed, executive function, and visuospatial perception at baseline and 16 months after surgery. Significant between-group differences were noted on a psychomotor processing speed task. However, a significantly higher proportion of DBS patients than controls demonstrated reliable individual decline on a word list recall task (HVLT-R) and on several processing speed tests. Reliable improvements were noted on tests of visuospatial functioning. There was variability in individual outcome on executive functioning tests, with a small proportion of DBS patients demonstrating reliable decline and some demonstrating reliable improvement. Use of Reliable Change highlights the occurrence of individual variability, revealing declines and improvements in a small proportion of unilateral DBS patients that were not evident upon group comparison. These findings must be interpreted in light of group-level differences between the PD control and DBS patients on demographic and disease-related factors.