Subthalamic Deep Brain Stimulation under General Anaesthesia for Parkinson’s Disease: Institutional Experience and Outcomes

DBS can be safely performed under general anaesthesia in a pragmatic clinical environment, provided a multidisciplinary committee for patient selection and a dedicated surgical and anaesthetic team are available. The effectiveness in ameliorating motor symptoms, the ability to reduce the drug load, and the improvement in quality of life demonstrated in clinical trials could be reproduced under more generalised conditions as in our centre. The need for a team learning curve and the progressive evolution in, and adaptation to, trajectory planning software, anaesthetic management, intraoperative imaging, DBS device upgrades, and programming schemes should be contemplated in the transition process to direct targeting.