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Impaired frontostriatal cognitive functioning following posteroventral pallidotomy in advanced Parkinson's disease We investigated the long-term effects of posteroventral pallidotomy on tests sensitive to the functional integrity of frontostriatal neural systems in a sample of 11 patients with advanced Parkinson's disease (PD). Patients were assessed within 1 month prior to surgery and at 12 months following pallidotomy. Changes in outcome measures were compared to a control sample of equally performing PD patients receiving nonsurgical medical management assessed over a 12-month period. Measures of cognitive abilities sensitive to frontostriatal functional integrity tested psychomotor processing speed, executive components of working memory, and reasoning. Additional tests of general mental status and semantic memory ability were utilized to assess the specificity of the effect of pallidotomy on cognitive function. Significant declines in performance on all measures sensitive to frontostriatal integrity were found for the surgery group but not the PD control group. No significant changes in performance were found on the measures of general mental status or semantic memory for either the surgery or PD control samples. These results suggest that the posteroventral pallidotomy selectively impairs performance on tests of frontostriatal cognitive abilities. Copyright 2000 Academic Press. Brain Cogn 2000 Apr;42(3):348-63 Stebbins GT, Gabrieli JD, Shannon KM, Penn RD, Goetz CG Department of Neurological Sciences, Rush Medical College. PMID: 10753484, UI: 20218806 janet paterson 53 now / 41 dx / 37 onset 613 256 8340 / PO Box 171 Almonte Ontario K0A 1A0 Canada visit my website "a new voice" at: http://www.geocities.com/janet313/