The Conservative Treatment of a Rare Postoperative Complication of DBS—Brain Abscess: Case Series

Guanghan Lu,* Jingxuan Liu,* Xiang Wei, Jiuqi Yan, Jian Sun, Wenwen Dong, Liang Zhao, Chang Qiu, Bei Luo, Wenbin Zhang Department of Functional Neurosurgery, Nanjing Brain Hospital, Nanjing, Jiang Su, People’s Republic of China*These authors contributed equally to this workCorrespondence: Wenbin Zhang, Nanjing Brain Hospital Affiliated to Nanjing Medical University, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China, Email [email protected]: Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an established treatment option for movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonia, so more and more patients (over 160,000 patients till 2019) worldwide have undergone DBS for a variety of neurological and non-neurological conditions, with numbers increasing each year. This case series primarily discusses a very rare complication following DBS surgery —— brain abscess.Case Presentation: We administered vancomycin and metronidazole to patients who developed brain abscesses after undergoing DBS surgery based on previous literature. After treatment, the abscess lesions and infection symptoms completely resolved, resulting in a good therapeutic outcome without the removal of the DBS system.Conclusion: In previous studies, similar cases always involved surgical intervention to drain the pus while also removing the DBS system; however, in our cases, the patient did not have the DBS system removed and achieved a good prognosis. To our knowledge, our two cases are among the few where a conservative treatment approach has been used for brain abscesses after DBS surgery.Keywords: DBS, brain abscess, STN, GPI, dyskinesia