BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE:Vitamin D deficiency is associated with cognitive impairment in the elderly and with increased white matter T2 hyperintensities in elderly debilitated patients. We investigated the relationship between serum vitamin D and brain MR findings in adult outpatients.

Deep brain stimulation is generally a safe and effective method of alleviating motor impairment in advanced-stage Parkinson's disease patients. However, adverse events of surgery have been noted, such as hemorrhage, infection, seizures, and device failure. In this report, we describe 2 cases of the unusual adverse event of ischemia associated with subthalamic nucleus stimulator implantation. We present the intraoperative neurological symptoms, microelectrode recording data, imaging findings, and other correlated events. In the first case, the clinical effects of ischemia were evident intraoperatively and coincided with silence during microelectrode recording from the ischemic region. In the second case, the timing of the ischemic event could not be determined precisely but also was associated with a difficult mapping. Subcortical ischemia may be an underrecognized event that confounds neurophysiological mapping of deep brain structures and affects clinical outcomes.

SYNOPSISPatients with chronic cluster headache refractive to agents such as lithium carbonate, methysergide, corticosteroids, or thecalcium channel blocking agents, may respond to histamine desensitization. Intravenous histamine phosphate administeredover a 10‐day treatment course in combination therapy with prophylactic agents, including H 1 and H 2 antagonists, may resultin a marked improvement in the frequency of cluster attacks. Sixty‐four patients seen at the Diamond Headache Clinic wereadmitted to the Inpatient Headache Unit at Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital and followed for a period up to one year afterdischarge. Twenty‐five patients had at least a 75% reduction in cluster attacks and all but nine patients demonstrated a partialreduction in their clusters. A group of patients who were previous treatment failures with established agents for chroniccluster were retreated with the same agent following histamine desensitization and had a significant improvement in theircluster attacks.Another group of patients responded to local application of 5% or 10% cocaine solution to the sphenopalatine ganglion. Whileuseful for some patients, the results did not achieve statistical significance compared to similarly treated patients who did notreceive cocainization of the sphenopalatine ganglion.

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