P19. Vigilance regulation pattern in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and depression measured by electroencephalography (EEG)

Abstract

Objective Disturbed regulation of vigilance in wake state seems to play a key role in the development of mental disorders. In an actual model by Hegerl et al. (2014) hyperactivity in ADHD is assumed to be an attempt to increase a general low vigilance level via external stimulation. For depression the avoidance of stimulation is interpreted as a reaction to a tonic increased vigilance state. Although ADHD is assumed to start during childhood, this vigilance model has only been tested in a pilot study with children diagnosed for ADHD so far and was not compared to children with diagnosis of depression. Routine or assisted EEGs are not recommended for assessing vigilance (Sander et al., 2015) but the question remains if brain arousal can still be measured with it. If yes, it might be useful for clinical praxis, if relevant diagnostic conclusions can be drawn sufficiently from routine EEG measures. Methods 137 reting state EEG (10 min) measures from two groups of psychiatric patients (age: 13 ± 3.7 years) diagnosed with either ADHD or depression were analyzed. Vigilance classifications are compared between both groups via two-sample t-tests and chi-square tests. We used n-mean cluster analysis to detect EEG-patterns of vigilance regulation. In an ANOVA model, the relation between vigilance regulation and mental health symptoms (child behaviour check list, CBCL/6-18) was analyzed. Results We found more classification of low arousing stage B2/3 in ADHD compared to depression (50–20%) p Conclusion This study revealed that vigilance classification based on MTA assisted routine EEG of children showed results which are in accordance to the assumptions of hypo-aroused brain activity in ADHD and a more hyper-aroused brain state in depression. Therefore similar brain arousal states in children in these diagnostic groups can be assumed as has been showed for adults before. Interestingly, we could assign these different brain arousal states directly to attentional problems in our study sample. In order to analyze the validity of vigilance regulation analysis from a routine EEG in more detail a further direct comparison to EEG assessment according to the VIGALL protocol is still needed.