Barbara Hollunder

Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin | Charité · Department of Neurology with Chair in Experimental Neurology/BNIC

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an established treatment for Parkinson's disease. Still, DBS parameter programming currently follows a tedious trial-and-error process. DBS-evoked cortical potentials (EP) might guide parameter selection but this concept has not yet been tested. Further, mounting wet EEG systems is too time-consuming to scale in outp...

Deep Brain Stimulation can improve tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, and axial symptoms in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Potentially, improving each symptom may require stimulation of different white matter tracts. Here, we study a large cohort of patients (N = 237 from five centers) to identify tracts associated with improvements in each of the...

Deep brain stimulation is a viable and efficacious treatment option for dystonia. While the internal pallidum serves as the primary target, more recently, stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) has been investigated. However, optimal targeting within this structure and its complex surroundings have not been studied in depth. Indeed, multiple...

Mapping circuits for DBS. Within the enigmatic depths of an aquatic universe, divers use flashlights to reveal the hidden contours of an uncharted seabed that teems with wondrous vegetation. In an analogous exploration, Hollunder et al. describe how invasive brain stimulation delivered to deep-seated brain nuclei may act as a beacon. Using deep br...

Frontal circuits play a critical role in motor, cognitive and affective processing, and their dysfunction may result in a variety of brain disorders. However, exactly which frontal domains mediate which (dys)functions remains largely elusive. We studied 534 deep brain stimulation electrodes implanted to treat four different brain disorders. By anal...

Background: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a promising treatment option for treatment- refractory obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Several stimulation targets have been used, mostly in and around the anterior limb of the internal capsule and ventral striatum (VC/VS). However, the precise target within this region remains a matter of debate. Me...

Objective: To describe relationships between electrode localization and motor outcomes from the subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) in early-stage Parkinson's disease (PD) pilot trial. Methods: To determine anatomical and network correlates associated with motor outcomes for subjects randomized to early DBS (n=14), voxel-wise...

The frontal cortex is involved in motor, cognitive, and affective brain functions. In humans, however, neuroanatomy-function mappings are predominantly derived from correlative neuroimaging studies. Hence, exactly which frontal domains causally mediate which function remains largely elusive. Herein, we leverage a strategy that allows for causal inf...

Following its introduction in 2014 and with support of a broad international community, the open-source toolbox Lead-DBS has evolved into a comprehensive neuroimaging platform dedicated to localizing, reconstructing, and visualizing electrodes implanted in the human brain, in the context of deep brain stimulation (DBS) and epilepsy monitoring. Expa...

Background Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a promising novel approach for managing refractory Gilles de la Tourette’s syndrome (GTS). The subthalamic nucleus (STN) is the most common DBS target for treating movement disorders, and smaller case studies have reported the efficacy of bilateral STN-DBS treatment for relieving tic symptoms. However, man...

Introduction: Neurocircuits are involved in the motor, cognitive, and affective dysfunctions of multiple brain disorders. Functional segregation into these domains has been widely defined on a fronto-cortical basis. However, despite considerable interaction, these functional domains remain partitioned to some extent at (sub)thalamic levels (1). To...

At the group-level, deep brain stimulation leads to significant therapeutic benefit in a multitude of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. At the single-patient level, however, symptoms may sometimes persist despite “optimal” electrode placement at established treatment coordinates. This may be partly explained by limitations of disease-cen...

Tourette syndrome (TS) constitutes a childhood-onset brain disorder with the defining presence of tic behaviors. Tics are repetitive movements or sounds that resemble voluntary actions but appear without embedment to discernable context (1). Effective therapy is complicated by phenotypical hetero-geneity, which arises not only from a wide variabili...

At the group-level, deep brain stimulation leads to significant therapeutic benefit in a multitude of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. At the single-patient level, however, symptoms may sometimes persist despite "optimal" electrode placement at established treatment coordinates. This may be partly explained by limitations of disease-cen...

The book is available here: https://www.elsevier.com/books/connectomic-deep-brain-stimulation/horn/978-0-12-821861-7

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is among the most disabling psychiatric disorders. Although deep brain stimulation is considered an effective treatment, its use in clinical practice is not fully established. This is, at least in part, due to ambiguity about the best suited target and insufficient knowledge about underlying mechanisms. Recent advances...

Background: Multiple deep brain stimulation (DBS) targets have been proposed for treating intractable obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Here, we investigated whether stimulation effects of different target sites would be mediated by one common or several segregated functional brain networks. Methods: Seeding from active electrodes of four patien...

In light of heterogeneous phenotypes across pathologies and patients, the treatment of network disorders via neuromodulation techniques -amongst them deep brain stimulation (DBS)- is largely complicated. This emphasizes the need for more precisely tailoring these techniques to the individual patient. The approach of this chapter to the topic of per...

Dysregulation of physiological stress reactivity plays a key role in the development and relapse risk of alcohol dependence. This article reviews studies investigating physiological responses to experimentally induced acute stress in patients with alcohol dependence. A systematic search from electronic databases resulted in 3641 articles found and...