title: Gender distribution of patients with Parkinson's disease treated with subthalamic deep brain stimulation; a review of the 2000-2009 literature.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) has been the mainstream surgical procedure for advanced Parkinson's disease (PD) during the last decade. Reports from a few individual centres have hinted that women who receive STN DBS are under-represented. We aimed to evaluate the gender distribution of patients with PD who had received STN DBS during the last ten years, and to discuss the findings in relation to studies on gender prevalence of PD.
  
  
  METHODS
  A search of the PubMed database of clinical papers in English language related to STN DBS between 2000 and 2009 was conducted. Care was taken to minimize redundancies in reporting of published patients. The proportion of men and women were expressed in total and according to pre-defined geographic regions.
  
  
  RESULTS
  One hundred and thirty five papers were eligible for review. The gender of the patients was specified in 119 papers on a total of 3880 patients, of which 63% were men. According to geographic origin of publications, the percentage of men with STN DBS was 68% in North America, 62% in Europe, 69% in Australia and 50% in Asia.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The proportion of male patients who undergo STN DBS seems to exceed the reported male/female ratio of patients with PD.
authors.affiliation: Department of Community Medicine and Rehabilitation, Occupational Therapy, University of Umeå, Sweden. gun-marie.hariz@neuro.umu.se
authors.forename: Gun-Marie
authors.initials: GM
authors.lastname: Hariz
authors.forename: Takeshi
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Nakajima
authors.forename: Patricia
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Limousin
authors.forename: Tom
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Foltynie
authors.forename: Ludvic
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zrinzo
authors.forename: Marjan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Jahanshahi
authors.forename: Katarina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Hamberg
mesh_terms: D046690:Deep Brain Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000628:therapy*; D039781:PubMed / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D017678:Sex Distribution; D020530:Subthalamus / Q000502:physiology*