Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
www.elsevier.com/locate/clinph
Department of Psychiatry, Kwandong University College of Medicine, Myongji Hospital, 697-24 Hwajeong, Dukyang, Gyang,
Gyunggi 412-270, Republic of Korea
Department of Neuropsychiatry, Hanyang University College of Medicine, 17 Haengdang, Seongdong, Seoul 133-791, Republic of Korea
c
Department of Psychology, Chung-Ang University, 221, Heukseok-dong, Dongjak-gu, Seoul 156-756, Republic of Korea
d
Department of Neuropsychiatry, Hallym University Han-Gang Sacred Heart Hospital, Seoul 150-719, Republic of Korea
e
Korean Intellectual Property Oce, 920 Dunsandong, Seogu, Daejeon 302-701, Republic of Korea
Accepted 4 August 2007
Available online 24 September 2007
Abstract
Objective: Recent ndings have demonstrated that the EEG possesses long-range temporal (auto-) correlations (LRTC) in the dynamics
of broad band oscillations. The analysis of LRTC provides a quantitative index of statistical dependencies in oscillations on dierent time
scales. We analyzed LRTC in resting EEG signals in depressed outpatients and healthy controls.
Methods: The participants in this study were 11 non-depressed, age-matched controls, and 11 unmedicated unipolar depressed patients.
EEG data were obtained from each participant during 5-min resting baseline periods with eyes closed and then analyzed with detrended
uctuation analysis (DFA), a scaling analysis method that quanties a simple parameter to represent the correlation properties of a time
series. The scaling exponent, the result of DFA, provides a quantitative measure of LRTC from the EEG.
Results: The present study demonstrates that all the scaling exponents in depressed patients and healthy controls were greater than 0.5
and less than 1.0, regardless of condition. Furthermore, the scaling exponents of depressed patients have relatively higher values in whole
brain regions compared to healthy controls, with signicant dierences at F3, C3, T3, T4 and O1 channels (p < 0.05). Finally, a significant linear correlation was observed between the severity of depression and the scaling exponent over most of the channels, except O2.
Conclusions: These results suggest that the brain aected by a major depressive disorder shows slower decay of the LRTC, and that the
persistence of the LRTC of EEG in depressed patients was associated with the severity of depression over most of the cortical areas.
Signicance: The DFA method may broaden our understanding of the psychophysiological basis of depression.
2007 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Major depressive disorder; EEG; Detrended uctuation analysis
1. Introduction
There is some evidence that the resting EEG may be a
useful tool in the study of depression. Patients diagnosed
with clinical depression have frequently exhibited increased
alpha and/or theta power (Nystrom et al., 1986; Pollock
Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 2 820 5851; fax: +82 2 816 5124.
E-mail address: clipsy@cau.ac.kr (J.-H. Lee).
and Schneider, 1990) as well as interhemispheric asymmetry (Schaer et al., 1983; Henriques and Dividson, 1990)
and hypocoherence in anterior regions (John et al., 1988;
Ford et al., 1986). These ndings for resting EEG in
depressed patients are based on morphologic analysis
which decomposes the component frequencies and amplitudes in the EEG oscillation.
In contrast to these conventional approaches in terms of
linear dynamics, alternative approaches were applied to the
EEG oscillations in the framework of non-linear dynamics.
1388-2457/$32.00 2007 International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.clinph.2007.08.001
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It was assumed that the EEG within a particular psychophysiological state could be described by non-linear
dynamics and, therefore, could be characterized by non-linear analysis. With regard to this perspective, there has been
a sustained interest in analyzing the EEG within the context of non-linear dynamics (Rapp et al., 1989; Rapp,
1993; Palus, 1996). Recent ndings have shown that the
EEG possesses long-range temporal (auto-) correlations
(LRTC) in the dynamics of broad band oscillations (Parish
et al., 2004; Watters and Martin, 2004) and narrow bandpass ltered oscillations (Linkenkaer-Hansen et al., 2001;
Nikulin and Brismar, 2005). The analysis of LRTC provides a quantitative index of statistical dependencies in
oscillations on dierent time scales (as opposed to crosscorrelation analysis, which provides an index of statistical
dependencies between dierent channels) (LinkenkaerHansen et al., 2005). An essential feature of LRTC is their
power-law behavior, which indicates that the mechanisms
contributing to their build-up are similar at dierent time
scales (Nikulin and Brismar, 2005). The importance of
LRTC stems from the fact that their presence is thought
to be advantageous for a reliable transfer of information
in neuronal populations (Chialvo and Bak, 1999; Beggs
and Plenz, 2003).
The characteristics of non-linear dynamics in EEG oscillations in patients with depressive disorder have been noted
in several clinical studies (Nandrino et al., 1994; Thomasson et al., 2000). These studies suggest that mood be considered to be a psychophysiological state emerging from a
specic neuronal process revealed by non-linear analysis
methods. However, there has been a diculty in establishing the nature of the underlying non-linear process more
precisely as it could be due to a number of interrelated
methodological drawbacks. One of these drawbacks is the
dierentiation between non-linear dynamics and noisy
background in a spatially extended system (Grassberger,
1989; Mayer-Kress and Kaneko, 1989; Palus, 1996). In this
context the detrended uctuation analysis (DFA), invented
by Peng et al. (1992), has been established as an important
non-linear analysis technique for the detection of LRTC in
a non-stationary time series. DFAs advantages are its
enabling the detection of LRTC embedded in a non-stationary time series, as well as its avoidance of the spurious
detection of apparent LRTC that are the noise of a nonstationary time series (Kantelhardt et al., 2001; Watters
and Martin, 2004). Several studies have applied DFA to
EEG analysis and have convincingly demonstrated that
EEG has LRTC (Pereda et al., 1998; Popivanov and Mineva, 1999; Linkenkaer-Hansen et al., 2001). Recently, we
have shown that LRTC in EEG by DFA during a hypnotic
state diers signicantly from that with no hypnotic state
(Lee et al., 2007).
Assuming that the depression is related to a particular
psychophysiological state, we analyzed LRTC in resting
EEG signals in depressed outpatients and healthy controls,
using the DFA method. Another important aspect related
to the description of psychophysiological state of depres-
All electrode impedances were below 5 kX. The EEG-measurement-device (LEX3208, LAXTHA Inc., Korea) settings were as follows: 256-Hz sampling rate, 12-bit
analog-to-digital (A/D) converter, 0.6-Hz high-pass lter,
46-Hz low-pass lter, and 60-Hz notch lter. The EEG
data were visually inspected for artifacts. Data contaminated with artifact were discarded.
2.3. Data analysis and statistics
The EEG data were successively segmented into consecutive 30 s epochs for DFA. The sequences of 10 30-s epochs of
each EEG served as the database. For each 30 s epoch, we
applied DFA according to the following algorithm (Peng
et al., 1995; Goldberger et al., 1999) and calculated the median value from the results of DFA at each channel. DFA is a
method for quantifying the correlation property in a nonstationary time series by computing a scaling exponent using
a modied root mean square analysis of a random walk.
Briey, the analysis is applied to a discrete time series
x(i), i = {1, . . ., N}, which in the present study represents
the synchronization likelihood averaged over all pairs of
channels for each time sample (N = 7680/30 = 256). In
the rst step, the mean is subtracted from this time series
and the time series is integrated
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k
X
yk
xi hxi
i1
Fig. 1. Time course of instantaneous amplitude of broad band oscillations. The amplitude at 15 Hz is shown for a typical F3 channel in the depressed
patient and healthy control during 30 s (a and b, respectively). Enlarged segment of time interval 03 s, for the depressed patient and healthy control (c and
d, respectively). For Fig. 2 data are presented for the same subject, F3 channel.
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F3
F4
C3
C4
T3
T4
O1
O2
*
Depressed patient
Healthy control
Mean
SD
Mean
SD
0.96
0.96
0.87
0.86
0.93
0.98
0.82
0.83
0.16
0.18
0.16
0.16
0.14
0.17
0.17
0.20
0.83
0.86
0.75
0.75
0.80
0.84
0.69
0.73
0.11
0.18
0.10
0.09
0.11
0.11
0.10
0.14
t
2.25*
1.29
2.22*
1.95
2.39*
2.36*
2.19*
1.34
Table 2
The scaling exponents of detrended uctuation analysis of resting EEG in
depressed patients (N = 11) and surrogate data (N = 11)
Channel
F3
F4
C3
C4
T3
T4
O1
O2
**
Table 3
Repeated measures ANOVA table for HEMISPHERE main eect
Channel
a
Right hemisphere
Left hemisphereb
Source
SS
DF
MS
ERROR
SITE
0.64
0.31
60
3
.01
.10
9.75
0.001*
ERROR
SITE
0.19
0.24
50.30
2.52
.004
.095
24.97
0.001*
p < 0.05.
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p < 0.05.
p < 0.01.
Depressed patient
Surrogate data
Mean
SD
Mean
SD
0.96
0.96
0.87
0.86
0.93
0.98
0.82
0.83
0.16
0.18
0.16
0.16
0.14
0.17
0.17
0.20
1.08
1.06
1.01
0.99
1.06
1.13
0.93
0.92
0.25
0.23
0.25
0.24
0.19
0.21
0.23
0.21
t
3.08*
2.83*
3.83*
2.76*
3.79**
3.79**
2.26*
2.97*
Table 4
Repeated measures ANOVA table for GROUP main eect
Channel
Source
SS
DF
MS
ERROR
GROUP
1.26
0.37
20
1
0.06
0.37
5.87
0.025*
ERROR
GROUP
1.32
0.27
20
1
0.07
0.27
4.14
0.055
p < 0.05.
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Fig. 3. Correlations between the DFA power-law scaling exponents of resting EEG and severity of depression of total participants (N = 22). BDI, Beck
depression inventory; *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01.
4. Discussion
In this study we analyzed the resting EEG of 11 unmedicated depressed patients and 11 healthy control participants by means of DFA, a scaling analysis method that
quanties a simple parameter to represent the correlation
properties of a time series. The scaling exponent, the result
of DFA, provides a quantitative measure of LRTC that
exists in the EEG. The present study demonstrates that
all the scaling exponents in depressed patients and healthy
controls were greater than 0.5 and less than 1.0, regardless
of their condition. These results show that the broadband
EEG in both depressed patients and healthy controls exhibit LRTC with power-law behavior.
Several studies have applied DFA to broadband EEG
and have found indications of LRTC with power-law
behavior. Watters and Martin (2004) reported that a mean
scaling exponent of 0.67 was the result of DFA applied to
the EEG obtained from 3 to 100 Hz, and our previous
study (Lee et al., 2007) reported a score of 0.91 from psychiatric outpatients. The main reasons for this dierence
are presumed to be that all of the participants of the latter
study had psychopathologies and were not controlled by
psychiatric medications. In this study, the mean scaling
exponent across all participants and sites of EEG was
0.84, which is located between the result of Watters and
Martin (2004) and the result obtained by our previous
study.
For the EEG data, non-linear dynamics algorithms can
give spurious results. Recently, the surrogate data techniques have been developed to distinguish the non-linear
systems from the linearly correlated noise (Theiler and
Rapp, 1996). We found that the scaling exponents of surrogate data have signicantly higher values compared with
depressed patients at all channels. That is a strong indication of the non-linear structure in the original EEG data.
From the above, it is apparent that LRTC with powerlaw scaling is a fundamental feature of brain activity. Further, the presence of power-law scaling behavior in the
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