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Critical Evaluation of the State of the Art in Surgery for Parkinson Disease: Should We Use the Same Criteria as for Drug Trials?
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| Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings. |
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During the last decade, Dr Anthony Lang and the Movement Disorder Group
of Toronto Western Hospital have gifted the medical community with several
outstanding scientific studies and reviews, especially in the field of surgery
for Parkinson disease (PD); their recent article1
was no exception.
The author's main critique of publications on surgery of PD, especially
pallidotomy and deep brain stimulation (DBS), concentrates on the lack of
large-scale studies that meet the requirements that are applied for medical
drug trials (ie, controlled, prospective, double-blind studies with independent
assessment using established scales). Dr Lang acknowledges the fact that it
is practically and ethically difficult to conduct surgical trials with sham
surgery. Furthermore, he reviews eloquently the great disparities in imaging
and surgical methods, intraoperative physiological techniques, patient selection,
etc, as well as the fact that the great majority of published studies on surgery
for PD report a small number of patients with . . . [Full Text of this Article]
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