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Background: Subthalamic deep brain stimulation (STN DBS) is an established therapy for Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients suffering from motor response fluctuations despite optimal medical treatment, or severe dopaminergic side effects. Despite careful clinical selection and surgical procedures, some patients do not benefit from STN DBS. Preoperative individual motor response prediction tools are suggested to decrease the number of suboptimal responders. Here, we test predictive performance of a preregistered prediction model, DBS-PREDICT, in an external, retrospective, multicenter cohort.

Methods: DBS-PREDICT considered eleven, solely pre-operative, clinical characteristics, and applied a logistic regression to differentiate between weak and strong motor responders. Weak motor response was defined as no clinically relevant improvement on UPDRS II, III or IV scales, one-year after surgery, defined as …