The sensitivity to change of the cluster headache quality of life scale assessed before and after deep brain stimulation of the ventral tegmental area.

Background: Cluster headache (CH) is a trigeminal autonomic cephalalgia (TAC) characterized by a highly disabling headache that negatively impacts quality of life and causes limitations in daily functioning as well as social functioning and family life. Since specific measures to assess the quality of life (QoL) in TACs are lacking, we recently developed and validated the cluster headache quality of life scale (CH-QoL). The sensitivity of CH-QoL to change after a medical intervention has not been evaluated yet.

Ventral tegmental area deep brain stimulation for chronic cluster headache: Effects on cognition, mood, pain report behaviour and quality of life.

Background: Deep brain stimulation in the ventral tegmental area (VTA-DBS) has provided remarkable therapeutic benefits in decreasing headache frequency and severity in patients with medically refractory chronic cluster headache (CH). However, to date the effects of VTA-DBS on cognition, mood and quality of life have not been examined in detail.

Methods: The aim of the present study was to do so in a case series of 18 consecutive patients with cluster headache who underwent implantation of deep brain stimulation electrodes in the ventral tegmental area.

Mental rotation and working memory in musicians' dystonia.

Background: Mental rotation of body parts engages cortical-subcortical areas that are actually involved in the execution of a movement. Musicians' dystonia is a type of focal hand dystonia that is grouped together with writer's cramp under the rubric of "occupational dystonia", but it is unclear to which extent these two disorders share common pathophysiological mechanisms. Previous research has demonstrated patients with writer's cramp to have deficits in mental rotation of body parts.

Decision-making impairments in Parkinson's disease as a by-product of defective cost-benefit analysis and feedback processing.

Studies examining decision-making in people with Parkinson's disease (PD) show impaired performance on a variety of tasks. However, there are also demonstrations that patients with PD can make optimal decisions just like healthy age-matched controls. We propose that the reason for these mixed findings is that PD does not produce a generalized impairment of decision-making, but rather affects sub-components of this process.

The effects of dopaminergic medication on dynamic decision making in Parkinson's disease.

In the present study we address the following questions: (1) How is performance affected when patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) perform a dynamic decision making task? (2) Does dopaminergic medication differentially affect dynamic decision making? To address these questions participants were trained with different goals during learning: either they made intervention-based decisions or prediction-based decisions during learning. The findings show that overall there is an advantage for those trained to intervene over those trained to predict. In addition, the results are the first demonstration that PD patients 'ON' (N=20) compared to 'OFF' L-Dopa (N=15) medication and also relative to healthy age matched controls (N=16) showed lower levels of relative improvement in the accuracy of their decisions in a dynamic decision making task, and tended to use sub-optimal strategies.

What are people with Parkinson's disease really impaired on when it comes to making decisions? A meta-analysis of the evidence.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with motor and cognitive impairment caused by dopamine dysregulation in the basal ganglia. Amongst a host of cognitive deficits, evidence suggests that decision-making is impaired in patients with PD, but the exact scope of this impairment is still unclear. The aim of this review was to establish which experimental manipulations commonly associated with studies involving decision-making tasks were most likely to generate impairments in performance in PD patients.