SummaryNeurons have a striking tendency to engage in oscillatory activities. One important type of oscillatory activity prevalent in the motor system occurs in the beta frequency band, at about 20 Hz. It is manifest during the maintenance of tonic contractions and is suppressed prior to and during voluntary movement [1–7]. This and other correlative evidence suggests that beta activity might promote tonic contraction, while impairing motor processing related to new movements [3, 8, 9]. Hence, bursts of beta activity in the cortex are associated with a strengthening of the motor effects of sensory feedback during tonic contraction and with reductions in the velocity of voluntary movements [9–11]. Moreover, beta activity is increased when movement has to be resisted or voluntarily suppressed [7, 12, 13]. Here we use imperceptible transcranial alternating-current stimulation to entrain cortical activity at 20 Hz in healthy subjects and show that this slows voluntary movement. The present findings are the first direct evidence of causality between any physiological oscillatory brain activity and concurrent motor behavior in the healthy human and help explain how the exaggerated beta activity found in Parkinson's disease can lead to motor slowing in this illness [14].

BackgroundAlthough deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) is a highly effective therapeutic intervention in severe Parkinson's disease, its mechanism of action remains unclear. One possibility is that DBS suppresses local pathologically synchronised oscillatory activity.MethodsTo explore this, the authors recorded from DBS electrodes implanted in the STN of 16 patients with Parkinson's disease during simultaneous stimulation (pulse width 60 μs; frequency 130 Hz) of the same target using a specially designed amplifier. The authors analysed data from 25 sides.ResultsThe authors found that DBS progressively suppressed peaks in local field potential activity at frequencies between 11 and 30 Hz as voltage was increased beyond a stimulation threshold of 1.5 V. Median peak power had fallen to 54% of baseline values by a stimulation intensity of 3.0 V.ConclusionThe findings suggest that DBS can suppress pathological 11–30 Hz activity in the vicinity of stimulation in patients with Parkinson's disease. This suppression occurs at stimulation voltages that are clinically effective.

Neuronal activity within and across the cortex and basal ganglia is pathologically synchronized, particularly at ∼ 20 Hz in patients with Parkinson's disease. Defining how activities in spatially distributed brain regions overtly synchronize in narrow frequency bands is critical for understanding disease processes like Parkinson's disease. To address this, we studied cortical responses to electrical stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) at various frequencies between 5 and 30 Hz in two cohorts of eight patients with Parkinson's disease from two different surgical centres. We found that evoked activity consisted of a series of diminishing waves with a peak latency of 21 ms for the first wave in the series. The cortical evoked potentials (cEPs) averaged in each group were well fitted by a damped oscillator function (r ≥0.9, P < 0.00001). Fits suggested that the natural frequency of the subthalamo-cortical circuit was around 20 Hz. When the system was forced at this frequency by stimulation of the STN at 20 Hz, the undamped amplitude of the modelled cortical response increased relative to that with 5 Hz stimulation in both groups (P ≤ 0.005), consistent with resonance. Restoration of dopaminergic input by treatment with levodopa increased the damping of oscillatory activity (as measured by the modelled damping factor) in both patient groups (P ≤0.001). The increased damping would tend to limit resonance, as confirmed in simulations. Our results show that the basal ganglia–cortical network involving the STN has a tendency to resonate at ∼ 20 Hz in Parkinsonian patients. This resonance phenomenon may underlie the propagation and amplification of activities synchronized around this frequency. Crucially, dopamine acts to increase damping and thereby limit resonance in this basal ganglia–cortical network.

No abstract

No abstract