How does subthalamic nucleus activity relate to Parkinson’s disease symptoms?

My last 5 years of Parkinson’s disease research summarized in 5 minutes at the DGKN Congress 2025 :)
youtu.be/M9alDh836oU ⬇️

Full preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

#Parkinsonsdisease #Parkinsons #DeepBrainStimulation

@mpicbs.bsky.social @ox.ac.uk @ucl.ac.uk @hhu.de @bihatcharite.bsky.social

#Neuroscience #Neurology #Parkinsonsdisease #Parkinsons #DeepBrainStimulation #Neurotechnology #Neuromodulation #Neurophysiology #BasalGanglia #OpenScience

I am sincerely grateful to my supervisors–Vadim Nikulin, Gabriel Curio, Gunnar Waterstraat, and Arno Villringer–for their consistent support, guidance, and for shaping my approach to rigorous scientific work.

I am deeply grateful to @julianneumann.bsky.social, @vlitvak.bsky.social, @ashwinioswal.bsky.social, Alfons Schnitzler, Esther Florin, Andrea Kühn, Jan Hirschmann, and Huiling Tan for sharing data and expertise, enabling me to synthesize their decades of experience into this work.

#Aperiodic broadband power:
↳ Likely indicates neuronal spiking.
↳ Reflects symptom severity within patients.
↳ Shows promise as a biomarker for adaptive deep brain stimulation.

#Powerspectrum analysis:
↳ Absolute power provides clearer insights than normalized power.
↳ Separating oscillations from the broadband improves interpretability.
↳ Theta & Low β & Low 𝛄 combined explained symptom severity better than beta alone.

#Reproducibility analysis:
↳ Levodopa modulates theta more strongly than beta oscillations.
↳ Beta does not consistently correlate with symptoms in single datasets.
↳ Replicating previous correlations requires cohorts of over 100 patients.

How does subthalamic activity relate to Parkinson’s disease symptoms?

In a truly collaborative effort across #DBS centers, we aggregated a diverse dataset of invasive recordings from 119 patients.

Full article: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Main findings 🧵⬇️

We were blown away by the public response to our findings that the infant brain can store memories. Many people wrote to share with us their first memories. To help us capture these reports, we created a short, anonymous survey. We hope you might also consider taking it. Please share with others! 🧠🧪

Excited to have my PhD project paper exploring the network mechanisms of neuromodulation accepted for publication!

We show how deep brain stimulation and medication exert a shared modulation of motor network synchrony in Parkinson's disease.