Alexithymia in patients with Parkinson's disease treated with DBS of the subthalamic nucleus: a case-control study

To evaluate the effect of deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN-DBS) on alexithymia, a deficit in affective regulation, comparing patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) submitted to STN-DBS (DBS group) to PD patients not yet treated with STN-DBS (pre-DBS group) and to healthy participants (C group).

We recruited 27 consecutive STN-DBS PD patients, 38 consecutive pre-DBS patients and 27 healthy participants. Patients were assessed for alexithymia (Toronto Alexithymia Scale), depression, [beck depression inventory (BDI)], and cognitive functions (reasoning, memory, attentional, and executive tests).

The DBS patients performed worse than the pre-DBS patients in the corsi's block-tapping test, in the phonemic fluency task and in the Frontal Assessment Battery. Around 30% of DBS (29.6%) and pre-DBS (31.6%) patients resulted alexithymic, compared with 14.8% in the C group. The results pointed out significantly higher alexithymia scores in both the DBS and pre-DBS groups compared with the C group, while no difference emerged between the DBS and pre-DBS groups. Pre-DBS group showed a significantly higher BDI score than the C group, while DBS group did not.

Although the results suggest that STN-DBS does not affect alexithymia, both the DBS and pre-DBS patients reported higher prevalence (about 30%) of alexithymia than did healthy subjects (14.8%).