Kügler C F, Taghavy A, Platt D
Chair of Internal Medicine and Gerontology, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, FRG.
Gerontology. 1993;39(5):280-303. doi: 10.1159/000213544.
Event-related P300 potentials are closely reflecting cognitive functions such as stimulus evaluation time (P300 latency) and task relevance (P300 amplitude). Hence, both their potential clinical application for detecting slight cognitive disturbances and an increasing interest in the aging of cognitive human brain functions resulted in a growing number of studies on age-related P300 changes. Although there are converging lines of evidence that aging results in prolongations of P300 latencies, reductions of P300 amplitudes and a more equipotential P300 scalp distribution, the amount of these changes and the best fit for the P300-age interactions, respectively, remain still controversial. In general, these P300 alterations obviously reflect only minor cognitive changes during normal aging. For their clinical application, however, it is necessary to obtain an age-matched normative database. Furthermore, the increased P300 variability in the elderly has to be reduced--as far as possible--by appropriate simple P300 paradigms which should be preferentially applied in longitudinal analyses to differentiate normal from pathological aging of cognitive functions. Finally, additional cross-correlational analyses between the P300 and morphological as well as neurobiochemical data are needed. By these means, our knowledge about age-related changes of cognitive brain functions should be considerably enlarged.
事件相关P300电位密切反映认知功能，如刺激评估时间（P300潜伏期）和任务相关性（P300波幅）。因此，其在检测轻微认知障碍方面的潜在临床应用以及对人类认知脑功能老化的日益关注，导致了越来越多关于与年龄相关的P300变化的研究。尽管有越来越多的证据表明，衰老会导致P300潜伏期延长、P300波幅降低以及P300头皮分布更趋于等电位，但这些变化的程度以及P300与年龄相互作用的最佳拟合情况仍存在争议。一般来说，这些P300改变显然仅反映正常衰老过程中的轻微认知变化。然而，对于其临床应用而言，有必要获得一个年龄匹配的正常数据库。此外，老年人中P300变异性的增加必须通过适当的简单P300范式尽可能降低，这些范式应优先应用于纵向分析，以区分认知功能的正常衰老与病理性衰老。最后，需要对P300与形态学以及神经生化数据进行额外的交叉相关分析。通过这些方法，我们关于认知脑功能与年龄相关变化的知识应该会大大扩展。
