Objective: To investigate the incidence of serious adverse events (SAE) of subthalamic deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) in elderly patients with Parkinson's disease (PD).
Methods: We investigated a group of 26 patients with PD who underwent STN-DBS at mean age 63.2 ± 3.3 years. The operated patients from the EARLYSTIM study (mean age 52.9 ± 6.6) were used as a comparison group. Incidences of SAE were compared between these groups.
Results: A higher incidence of psychosis and hallucinations was found in these elderly patients compared to the younger patients in the EARLYSTIM study (p < 0.01).
Conclusions: The higher incidence of STN-DBS-related psychiatric complications underscores the need for comprehensive psychiatric pre- and postoperative assessment in older DBS candidates. However, these psychiatric SAE were transient, and the benefits of DBS clearly outweighed its adverse effects.
Keywords: Parkinson's disease (PD); adverse events; age factors; deep brain stimulation (DBS); psychosis.