Background: 1) Temporal lobe Epilepsy and Alzheimer¿s disease (AD) show similarities of clinical interest. In AD, the incidence of convulsive seizures is 10 times higher than in the age-matched general population; 2) epilepsy is 87 times more frequent in AD patients with early- than late-onset disease and occurs particularly early in familial AD; 3) cognitive decline starts 5.5 years earlier in AD patients with epilepsy than AD controls; 4) cortical resting state eyes-closed electroencephalographic (EEG) activities at delta (about 2-4 Hz) and alpha (about 8-12 Hz) rhythms are abnormal in patients with dementia (ADD) and mild cognitive impairment (ADMCI) due to AD.
Aim: The present study will test the working hypothesis that compared with AD patients with mild cognitive impairment (ADMCI) and without EEG epileptiform activity (ADMCI-noEpil), those with EEG epileptiform activity (ADMCI-Epil) may be characterized by greater abnormalities in typical cortical rsEEG activity altered in AD patients with dementia such as delta and alpha rhythms.
Methods: We will recruit 40 ADMCI subjects: 20 ADMCI-noEpil and 20 ADMCI-Epil. Forty demographic matched healthy elderly (Nold) subjects will also be available in UNIROMA1 archive. eLORETA will estimate the rsEEG cortical sources from delta to gamma. Statistical analysis at the group level (i.e. statistical comparisons among Nold ADMCI-noEpil and ADMCI-Epil groups) will be carried out by the commercial tool STATISTICA 10 (StatSoft Inc, www.statsoft.com). Receiver operating characteristic curve (ROCC) will classify rsEEG sources across ADMCI-noEpil and ADMCI-Epil individuals. These classifications will be performed by GraphPad Prism software (GraphPad Software, Inc, California, USA).
