Forty-eight PD patients underwent unilateral surgery to either GPi or STN and completed the Apathy Scale prior to surgery and 2, 4, and 6 months post-surgery.
Of this series, final evaluation was conducted on 36 feet of 21 female patients: 15 patients (71.4%) underwent bilateral (all in two stages), and 6 (28.6%) had unilateral surgery; 14 patients were lost to follow-up.
We also observe that 43 of the 47 patients had unilateral surgery.
The risk of postoperative bleeding doubled during bilateral thyroid surgery compared with unilateral surgery, occurring in 2.0% of bilateral operations compared with 1% of unilateral operations [ 8].
Fewer patients undergoing simultaneous bilateral surgery than those undergoing unilateral surgery had hyperglycemia (4/19 vs. 72/170) but after adjustments, there was no statistically significant difference (Table 2).
For 31 subjects who had unilateral surgery without any signs or suggestions of contralateral involvement, movement in the operated hip was compared to that in the normal hip.
The decision to use bilateral or unilateral surgery must be based on the neurological and radiological findings of each patient [ 5, 7, 15, 19].
However, persons with little or no ataxia or cognitive deficits, but with disabling medically resistant tremor may still be candidates, at least for unilateral surgery, which is less likely to worsen ataxia and cognition than bilateral surgery.
In addition, mortality after simultaneous bilateral THA has most commonly been investigated using unilateral surgery for comparison, and not staged bilateral surgery, which would be the relevant control group [ 6, 7, 16].
Between October 2007 and February 2009, all patients with operable breast cancer and scheduled for unilateral surgery at the multidisciplinary breast centre of the University Hospitals in Leuven were assessed before surgery.
