Applied neuroscience in clinical practice:
what can event related potentials
add for diagnostic and treatment procedures
by Prof. Jury Kropotov , USSR State Prize Winner,
Director of laboratory of the Institute of the Human Brain of
Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia
Professor of Norwegian University of Science and
Technology, Trondheim, Norway
• Electrophysiological studies play important role in applied neuroscience. Because of high temporal resolution they are the only methods that allow neuroscientists to assessbrain functions.
• Research shows that quantitative EEG (QEEG) and event related potentials (ERPs) reflect quite independent parts of brain functioning: QEEG reflect mechanisms of cortical self-regulation whereas ERPs reflect information flow within cortical neuronal networks. The patient might have a normal self-regulation but abnormal information flow, and vise versa.
• Meta analysis of applied neuroscience literature within the frames of “diagnosis and
treatment of brain dysfunction”shows that number of papers in ERP research is 10 times
larger than the number of papers in QEEG research with this ratio dramatically increasing
over the last five years.
• The effect size in ERP discriminant (patients vs. norms) analysis is usually much higher than the effect size in QEEG analysis.
Literature search
Keywords in PubMed:
1) “Quantitative EEG”, and “diagnosis”
2) “Event related potentials” and “diagnosis”
| |
QEEG
diagnosis
|
ERP
diagnosis
|
| 1991-1995 |
44 |
107 |
| 1996-2000 |
54 |
216 |
| 2001-2010 |
67 |
281 |
| 2006-2010 |
70
|
335 |