• Yi Wang, Liangchen Yu, Hongliang Mao, Xianwen Chen, Panpan Hu, Yue Ge, Yue Liu, Jiarui Zhang, and Hongwei Cheng.
• Department of Neurosurgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, P.R. China.
• World Neurosurg. 2024 Jul 1; 187: e148e155e148-e155.

ObjectiveTo investigate the involvement of the visual cortex in improving freezing of gait (FoG) after subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients using whole-brain seed-based functional connectivity.MethodsA total of 66 PD patients with FoG who underwent bilateral STN-DBS were included in our study. Patients were divided into a FoG responder group and an FoG nonresponder group according to whether FoG improved 1 year after DBS. We compared the differences in clinical characteristics, brain structural imaging, and seed-based functional connectivity between the 2 groups. The locations of active contacts were further analyzed.ResultsAll PD patients benefited from STN-DBS. No significant differences in the baseline characteristics or brain structures were found between the 2 groups. Seed-based functional connectivity analysis revealed that better connectivity in bilateral primary visual areas was associated with better clinical improvement in FoG (P < 0.05 familywise error corrected). Further analysis revealed that this disparity was associated with the location of the active contacts within the rostral region of the sensorimotor subregion in the FoG responder group, in contrast to the findings in the FoG nonresponder group.ConclusionsThis study suggested that DBS in the rostral region of the STN sensorimotor subregion may alleviate FoG by strengthening functional connectivity in primary visual areas, which has significant implications for guiding surgical strategies for FoG in the future.Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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