Deep brain stimulation of the internal capsule enhances human cognitive control and prefrontal cortex function.
other · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 30948727.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-019-09557-4 and PMC identifier 6449385.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a circuit-oriented treatment for mental disorders. Unfortunately, even well-conducted psychiatric DBS clinical trials have yielded inconsistent symptom relief, in part because DBS' mechanism(s) of action are unclear. One clue to those mechanisms may lie in the efficacy of ventral internal capsule/ventral striatum (VCVS) DBS in both major depression (MDD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). MDD and OCD both involve deficits in cognitive control. Cognitive control depends on prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions that project into the VCVS. Here, we show that VCVS DBS' effect is explained in part by enhancement of PFC-driven cognitive control. DBS improves human subjects' performance on a cognitive control task and increases theta (5-8Hz) oscillations in both medial and lateral PFC. The theta increase predicts subjects' clinical outcomes. Our results suggest a possible mechanistic approach to DBS therapy, based on tuning stimulation to optimize these neurophysiologic phenomena.
Medical subject headings
- Cognition
- Deep Brain Stimulation
- Major Depressive Disorder
- Internal Capsule
- Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
- Prefrontal Cortex