Parkinson's disease surgery: Advances and future strategies

The recent resurgence of surgical treatment of Parkinson's disease has gene rated enormous interest in the scientific community and with the general pu blic. Both ablation (pallidotomy, thalamotomy), deep brain stimulation (tha lamus, pallidum, subthalamus), and neural transplantation (human, porcine) have been demonstrated to be effective for specific subsets of Parkinson's disease patients. Future studies need to define better the ideal target sit es and lesion volume of ablation and stimulation procedures, and optimising graft survival in neural transplantation. Numerous potential surgical inte rventions are currently being evaluated.