Is microelectrode recording necessary?

Microelectrode recording has been used for the past fifty years to perform surgery for movement disorders. At the present time, however, there is still debate about whether it is necessary to perform these surgeries. In this article we describe the methods most commonly used for microrecording. The results of surgeries performed with and without microelectrode recording (MER) are compared. Several questions remain unanswered at present. These include but are not limited to the following: Does MER improve outcome? Is MER associated with increased overall risk to the patient? Is the information provided by MER more crucial for ablative or deep brain stimulation procedures? Recent interest in pooling neurosurgical data may provide additional insights in this debate.