Pallidotomy in Parkinson's Disease

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Abstract
Most of us remember the ballyhoo over adrenal medullary caudate transplants, originated in Mexico, for Parkinson's disease. Some centers in the United States rapidly adopted this procedure. Many patients and physicians were convinced that it would offer relief from this awful and relatively ubiquitous disease. Objective investigations, however, showed that the vast majority of the patients failed to derive any significant benefit from the transplants. The short-term “improvement” reported may have been a result of a combination of placebo, sloppy follow-up, wishful thinking, and “something else” (growth factors, a lesion in the caudate, etc.). To our knowledge, no centers currently perform adrenal medullary transplantation, and the silence from Mexico has been deafening.

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