Abstract
Impairment of executive function has been reported in patients with prolactinomas. However, few studies have investigated the electrophysiological mechanisms of response activation and response inhibition in these patients. In this study, we employ an event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to quantitatively assess response activation and inhibition before and after the surgical treatment of prolactinomas. A 64-electrode electroencephalogram (EEG) skullcap was used to record the brain activity in 20 pre-operative patients, 20 follow-up post-operative patients, and 20 healthy controls (HCs) while performing the visual Go/Nogo task. As expected, we identified P300 across all study populations that could reflect response activation and inhibition. Across the three groups, the Nogo stimuli evoked larger frontal-central P300 than the Go stimuli did. In contrast, the Go trials elicited larger parietal P300 than the Nogo trials did. The peak latency of P300 was significantly delayed in both the pre-operative and the post-operative groups compared to the HCs. The amplitude of P300 in both the Go and the Nogo conditions was significantly decreased in the pre-operative patients compared with that of the HCs. At 6 months post-operatively, the prolactinoma patients showed an increase in amplitude of P300 during both the Go and the Nogo tasks. These findings indicate that the prolactinoma patients suffer from deficits in response activation and inhibition, which could be improved by surgical treatment.
Highlights
Pituitary tumors are the second most common intracranial tumors, accounting for about 16.5% of central nervous system tumors (Ostrom et al, 2018)
The findings suggest that the amplitude of P300 was reduced within the anterior regions in the Nogo condition in patients with schizophrenia compared with healthy controls (HCs; Fallgatter et al, 2003)
We found a slightly larger P300nogo in the HCs compared to the pre-operative group, but the peak latency of P300 was more delayed in the prolactinoma patients compared to the HCs (Cao et al, 2017)
Summary
Pituitary tumors are the second most common intracranial tumors, accounting for about 16.5% of central nervous system tumors (Ostrom et al, 2018). Response Activation and Inhibition in Prolactinomas deficits in attention (Bala et al, 2016), working memory (Brummelman et al, 2011), executive function (Yao et al, 2017), depression (Meyers, 1998), and emotion processing (Song et al, 2018). The inhibitory control functions of the frontal cortex are responsible for inhibiting unrelated thoughts or actions towards specific tasks, self-monitoring, and self-regulating (Kuwabara et al, 2014). These inhibitory functions substantially rely upon the frontal cortex, they may depend upon both incoming and outgoing pathways involving many other cortical and subcortical structures (Rubia et al, 2001)
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