  Parkinson's disease is an ongoing challenge to theoretical neuroscience and
to medical treatment. During the evolution of the disease, neurodegeneration
leads to physiological and anatomical changes that affect the neuronal
discharge of the Basal Ganglia to an extent that impairs normal behavioral
patterns. To investigate this problem, single Globus Pallidus pars interna
(GPi) neurons of the 6-OHDA rat model of Parkinson's disease were
extracellularly recorded at different degrees of alertness and compared to
non-Parkinson control neurons. A structure function analysis of these data
revealed that the temporal range of rate-coded information in GPi was
substantially reduced in the Parkinson animal-model, suggesting that a
dominance of small neighborhood dynamics could be the hallmark of Parkinson's
disease. A mathematical-model of the GPi circuit, where the small neighborhood
coupling is expressed in terms of a diffusion constant, corroborates this
interpretation.
