Remifentanil Requirement in Patients Receiving Surgical Treatment of Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is one the main neurodegenerative disease with an incidence of about 3% in patients older than 65 years. Anesthesia in PD patients has been focused by several studies for concerning the interactive reaction between anesthetics and anti-Parkinsonian medication or Parkinsonian symptoms. However, our previous experience showed that the patients undergoing pulse generator placement were more prone to be involved in delayed emergence in the recovery room, which had been not reported yet. We speculated that PD patients might be a special population with abnormal pharmacodynamic characters of anesthetics, though no related evidence could be found to support this hypothesis. Therefore, in this project we investigated whether remifentanl requirement to inhibit patients' response to trachea intubation and skin insertion in PD patients undergoing DBS and pulse generator placement was different from non-PD patients undergoing intracranial surgery for reasons other than PD.