Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Freiburg Medical Center, Freiburg, Germany.
Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2022 Jul 29;12(1):13068. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-17304-x.
One of the great challenges in psychiatry is finding reliable biomarkers that may allow for more accurate diagnosis and treatment of patients. Neural variability received increasing attention in recent years as a potential biomarker. In the present explorative study we investigated temporal variability in visually evoked EEG activity in a cohort of 16 adult participants with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and 19 neurotypical (NT) controls. Participants performed a visual oddball task using fine and coarse checkerboard stimuli. We investigated various measures of neural variability and found effects on multiple time scales. (1) As opposed to the previous studies, we found reduced inter-trial variability in the AS group compared to NT. (2) This effect builds up over the entire course of a 5-min experiment and (3) seems to be based on smaller variability of neural background activity in AS compared to NTs. The here reported variability effects come with considerably large effect sizes, making them promising candidates for potentially reliable biomarkers in psychiatric diagnostics. The observed pattern of universality across different time scales and stimulation conditions indicates trait-like effects. Further research with a new and larger set of participants are thus needed to verify or falsify our findings.
精神病学的一大挑战是寻找可靠的生物标志物，以便更准确地诊断和治疗患者。近年来，神经变异性作为一种潜在的生物标志物受到了越来越多的关注。在本探索性研究中，我们研究了 16 名成年阿斯伯格综合征（AS）患者和 19 名神经典型（NT）对照组参与者的视觉诱发脑电图活动中的时间变异性。参与者使用细和粗棋盘刺激执行视觉异常任务。我们研究了多种神经变异性测量方法，发现了多个时间尺度的影响。（1）与之前的研究相反，我们发现 AS 组的试验间变异性比 NT 组降低。（2）这种效应在整个 5 分钟实验过程中逐渐增强，（3）似乎基于 AS 组与 NT 相比，神经背景活动的变异性较小。这里报道的变异性效应具有相当大的效应量，使它们成为精神病学诊断中潜在可靠生物标志物的有希望的候选者。在不同的时间尺度和刺激条件下观察到的普遍性模式表明存在特质性效应。因此，需要有一组新的更大的参与者进行进一步的研究，以验证或推翻我们的发现。
