Alternating verbal fluency performance following bilateral subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation for Parkinson's disease

Background and purpose Despite common occurrences of verbal fluency declines following bilateral subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN‐DBS) for the treatment of Parkinson's disease (PD), alternating fluency measures using cued and uncued paradigms have not been evaluated. Methods Twenty‐three STN‐DBS patients were compared with 20 non‐surgical PD patients on a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment, including cued and uncued intradimensional (phonemic/phonemic and semantic/semantic) and extradimensional (phonemic/semantic) alternating fluency measures at baseline and 6‐month follow‐up. Results STN‐DBS patients demonstrated a greater decline on the cued phonemic/phonemic fluency and the uncued phonemic/semantic fluency tasks compared to the PD patients. For STN‐DBS patients, verbal learning and information processing speed accounted for a significant proportion of the variance in declines in alternating phonemic/phonemic and phonemic/semantic fluency scores, respectively, whilst only naming was related to uncued phonemic/semantic performance for the PD patients. Both groups were aided by cueing for the extradimensional task at baseline and follow‐up, and the PD patients were also aided by cueing for the phonemic/phonemic task on follow‐up. Conclusions These findings suggest that changes in alternating fluency are not related to disease progression alone as STN‐DBS patients demonstrated greater declines over time than the PD patients, and this change was related to declines in information processing speed.