Abstract
Economic decision-making is disrupted in individuals with gambling disorder, an addictive behavior observed in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients receiving dopaminergic therapy. The subthalamic nucleus (STN) is involved in the inhibition of impulsive behaviors; however, its role in impulse control disorders and addiction is still unclear. Here, we recorded STN local field potentials (LFPs) in PD patients with and without gambling disorder during an economic decision-making task. Reaction times analysis showed that for all patients, the decision whether to risk preceded task onset. We compared then for both groups the STN LFP preceding high- and low-risk economic decisions. We found that risk avoidance in gamblers correlated with larger STN LFP low-frequency (<12-Hz) fluctuations preceding task onset. In particular, the amplitude of low-frequency LFP fluctuations carried significant information about future decisions. Decisions of patients not affected by gambling disorder were instead not correlated with pretask STN LFP. Our results suggest that STN activity preceding task onset affects risk decisions by preemptively inhibiting attraction to high but unlikely rewards in favor of a long-term payoff.
Footnotes
Authors declare no conflict of interests.
A.M. was supported by institutional fund from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna IEXERC14AM. M.R. was supported by the Italian Ministry of Health grant GR-2011-0235287 and by project “RD_aDBS” ERANET Neuron 2013. The University of Milan was partly supported by the Aldo Ravelli Donation for Research on Parkinson’s Disease. L.M.R. was partly supported by the Italian Ministry of Health grant GR-2009-1594645. S.M. was supported by the Bertarelli Foundation and by institutional funds from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed.