Alzheimer's disease (AD) and vascular dementia (VaD) present with similar clinical symptoms of cognitive decline, but the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms differ. To determine whether clinical electroencephalography (EEG) can provide information relevant to discriminate between these diagnoses, we used quantitative EEG analysis to compare the spectra between non-medicated patients with AD (n = 77) and VaD (n = 77) and healthy elderly normal controls (NC) (n = 77). We use curve-fitting with a combination of a power loss and Gaussian function to model the averaged resting-state spectra of each EEG channel extracting six parameters. We assessed the performance of our model and tested the extracted parameters for group differentiation. We performed regression analysis in a multivariate analysis of covariance with group, age, gender, and number of epochs as predictors and further explored the topographical group differences with pair-wise contrasts. Significant topographical differences between the groups were found in several of the extracted features. Both AD and VaD groups showed increased delta power when compared to NC, whereas the AD patients showed a decrease in alpha power for occipital and temporal regions when compared with NC. The VaD patients had higher alpha power than NC and AD. The AD and VaD groups showed slowing of the alpha rhythm. Variability of the alpha frequency was wider for both AD and VaD groups. There was a general decrease in beta power for both AD and VaD. The proposed model is useful to parameterize spectra, which allowed extracting relevant clinical EEG key features that move toward simple and interpretable diagnostic criteria.
Pubmed ID: 25762978 RIS Download
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Interactive Matlab toolbox for processing continuous and event-related EEG, MEG and other electrophysiological data incorporating independent component analysis (ICA), time/frequency analysis, artifact rejection, event-related statistics, and several useful modes of visualization of the averaged and single-trial data. First developed on Matlab 5.3 under Linux, EEGLAB runs on Matlab v5 and higher under Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X (Matlab 7+ recommended). EEGLAB provides an interactive graphic user interface (GUI) allowing users to flexibly and interactively process their high-density EEG and other dynamic brain data using independent component analysis (ICA) and/or time/frequency analysis (TFA), as well as standard averaging methods. EEGLAB also incorporates extensive tutorial and help windows, plus a command history function that eases users'' transition from GUI-based data exploration to building and running batch or custom data analysis scripts. EEGLAB offers a wealth of methods for visualizing and modeling event-related brain dynamics, both at the level of individual EEGLAB ''datasets'' and/or across a collection of datasets brought together in an EEGLAB ''studyset.'' For experienced Matlab users, EEGLAB offers a structured programming environment for storing, accessing, measuring, manipulating and visualizing event-related EEG data. For creative research programmers and methods developers, EEGLAB offers an extensible, open-source platform through which they can share new methods with the world research community by publishing EEGLAB ''plug-in'' functions that appear automatically in the EEGLAB menu of users who download them. For example, novel EEGLAB plug-ins might be built and released to ''pick peaks'' in ERP or time/frequency results, or to perform specialized import/export, data visualization, or inverse source modeling of EEG, MEG, and/or ECOG data. EEGLAB Features * Graphic user interface * Multiformat data importing * High-density data scrolling * Defined EEG data structure * Open source plug-in facility * Interactive plotting functions * Semi-automated artifact removal * ICA & time/frequency transforms * Many advanced plug-in toolboxes * Event & channel location handling * Forward/inverse head/source modeling
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