Beta and gamma band modulation by pallidal stimulation in Huntington's disease

• Pallidal deep brain stimulation modulates beta and gamma band activity in Huntington’s disease.¹
• DBS and band-specific EEG measures are electrophysiology and neuromodulation methods for movement disorders.^{1 1}

Weekly enrichment (2026-07-20)

• The source article, by Marta Magriço, Elena Moro, Valérie Fraix, Stephan Chabardes and Sara Meoni, appears in Clinical Neurophysiology (Vol. 186, June 2026) as a short “Letters to the Editor” communication on beta- and gamma-band modulation by pallidal deep brain stimulation in Huntington’s disease.²
• The full text and abstract are behind a publisher robot/captcha wall, so the article’s specific cohort size, stimulation parameters, and numeric spectral results could not be retrieved and are not reported here; the following bullets provide closely related, separately attributed context on pallidal DBS oscillations in HD.²
• The Grenoble group’s senior authors (Moro, Fraix, Chabardes) have long worked on globus pallidus internus (GPi) DBS for Huntington’s disease, where stimulation is used chiefly to control chorea and other hyperkinetic symptoms.²
• In a related single-case GPi-DBS study, resting local field potentials showed a predominant theta/alpha peak (6–9 Hz) and a smaller low-beta peak (13.5–14.5 Hz) during DBS-OFF, and active stimulation significantly suppressed both bands.³
• In that case, band suppression tracked clinical benefit: the UHDRS total motor score fell by 38 points and motor stereotypies and vocalizations resolved, though a freezing of gait re-emerged, illustrating a parkinsonism trade-off of pallidal stimulation.³
• A separate multi-patient study (15 HD patients undergoing DBS with video-synchronized LFP recording) found dual oscillatory signatures — theta power (2–8 Hz) rising during hyperkinetic states and high-beta power (20–30 Hz) rising during hypokinetic states — each correlating with clinical symptom severity.⁴
• That study also linked globus pallidus externus–internus theta coherence to indirect-pathway structural connectivity and pallidal high-beta power to direct-pathway functional connectivity, localizing theta oscillations to the posterior globus pallidus.⁴
• Together these findings support the article’s theme that beta/gamma (and theta) band activity in the pallidum can serve as circuit-specific electrophysiological biomarkers for optimizing DBS therapy in Huntington’s disease.²⁴

Footnotes

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1388245726001975?dgcid=rss_sd_all ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1388245726001975 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. https://doi.org/10.1002/mdc3.13644 ↩ ↩²

4. https://doi.org/10.1002/mds.70290 ↩ ↩² ↩³