Altered Interhemispheric Functional Connectivity Associated With Early Verbal Fluency Decline After Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson’s Disease

BACKGROUND: Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) experience a decline in verbal fluency (VF) immediately after undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN). This phenomenon is thought to be related to surgical microlesions. PURPOSE: We investigated the alterations in interhemispheric functional connectivity after STN-DBS in PD patients. We also evaluated the correlation between these changes and decreased VF scores. METHOD: Overall, 30 patients with PD were enrolled in the study. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans were performed twice, once before and once after DBS, in PD patients. Voxel-mirrored homotopic connectivity (VMHC) was applied in order to evaluate the synchronicity of functional connectivity between the hemispheres. RESULT: After undergoing STN-DBS, PD patients demonstrated reduced VMHC value in the posterior cerebellum lobe, angular gyrus, precuneus/posterior cingulate gyrus (PCC), supramarginal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus (SFG) (medial and dorsolateral) and middle frontal gyrus (MFG). In addition, we observed a significant positive correlation between the altered VMHC value in the SFG and MFG and the change of phonemic VF scores. CONCLUSION: PD patients demonstrated an interhemispheric coordination disorder in the prefrontal cortex, cerebellum, supramarginal gyrus and DMN after undergoing STN-DBS. The positive correlation between reduced VMHC value in the SFG and MFG and the changes of VF scores provides a novel understanding with regard to the decline of VF after DBS.