Alzheimer's Disease Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Alzheimer's Disease, including details on diagnosis, memory loss, heredity, treatment, medication.

Regional analysis of spontaneous MEG rhythms in patients with Alzheimer's disease using spectral entropies.

Poza J, Hornero R, Escudero J, Fernández A, Sánchez CI

Biomedical Engineering Group, Department T.S.C.I.T., E.T.S. Ingenieros de Telecomunicación, University of Valladolid, Camino del Cementerio s/n, 47011, Valladolid, Spain. jespoz@tel.uva.es

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. Ageing is the greatest known risk factor for this disorder. Therefore, the prevalence of AD is expected to increase in western countries due to the rise in life expectancy. Nowadays, a low diagnosis accuracy is reached, but an early and accurate identification of AD should be attempted. In this sense, only a few studies have focused on the magnetoencephalographic (MEG) AD patterns. This work represents a new effort to explore the ability of three entropies from information theory to discriminate between spontaneous MEG rhythms from 20 AD patients and 21 controls. The Shannon (SSE), Tsallis (TSE), and Rényi (RSE) spectral entropies were calculated from the time-frequency distribution of the power spectral density (PSD). The entropies provided statistically significant lower values for AD patients than for controls in all brain regions (p < 0.0005). This fact suggests a significant loss of irregularity in AD patients' MEG activity. Maximal accuracy of 87.8% was achieved by both the TSE and RSE (90.0%, sensitivity; 85.7%, specificity). The statistically significant results obtained by both the extensive (SSE and RSE) and non-extensive (TSE) spectral entropies suggest that AD could disturb long and short-range interactions causing an abnormal brain function.

Published 18 December 2007 in Ann Biomed Eng, 36(1): 141-52.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2004-2008 Alzheimer's Disease Research Today. All Rights Reserved.