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EEG Microstates Reveal Differences in Adults With ADHD
A specific cerebral activity state, detectable using electroencephalography (EEG) and associated with sleep and attention, lasted longer in adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than in adults without ADHD, according to a study published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging.
"The aim of this study was to investigate EEG microstates as potentially novel functional biomarkers for ADHD," researchers wrote. "By applying this method to adult ADHD patients, we uncovered new electrophysiological characteristics of this disorder," researchers wrote in the study.
The microstates technique looks at combined spatial and temporal aspects of a person's cerebral activity. Five microstates, or main configurations lettered from A to E, are particularly interesting to neuroscientists. Microstates A through E shift from one to another and last only about 100 milliseconds each.
Researchers compared microstates in adults with and without ADHD during rest in 2 datasets. The first consisted of 66 patients with ADHD and 66 neurotypical control subjects. In patients with ADHD, microstate A appeared to have a shorter duration, the study found.
"By comparing this observation with the data from clinical questionnaires, we observed that this state is inversely correlated to symptoms of inattention," said study first author Victor Férat, a researcher and PhD candidate at the Functional Brain Mapping Laboratory at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Microstate D, meanwhile, which has been reported to be expressed more during tasks requiring attention, had a longer duration in patients with ADHD. This was associated with increased sleep disturbance in the patient cohort, a common ADHD symptom
When researchers looked at microstates in the second dataset of 22 patients with ADHD and 22 neurotypical controls, findings concerning microstate D were replicated. Those involving microstate A were not.
"We have confirmed across two datasets that microstates D and/or A may be promising functional biomarkers of ADHD (or at least one subtype of it)," researchers concluded. "To date, although no biological markers have been successfully used to clearly diagnose or guide ADHD treatment, the potential application of microstate analysis in this population could prove to be an additional asset, to better understand its neurophysiological mechanisms."
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