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 ADD patients without a clinical diagnosis of epilepsy (ADD-noEpilepsy), those with a clinical diagnosis of epilepsy (ADD-Epilepsy) are characterized by greater abnormalities in typical cortical rsEEG activity altered in ADD patients such as delta and alpha rhythms.
Methods: We will recruit 40 ADD subjects: 20 ADD-noEpilepsy and 20 ADD-Epilepsy. Forty demographic matched healthy elderly (Nold) subjects will also be available in UNIROMA1 archive. The rsEEG data will be collected from 19 scalp electrodes placed following 10¿20 System. Individual alpha frequency peak (IAF) will be used to determine the delta, theta, alpha1, alpha2, and alpha3 frequency band ranges. Fixed beta1, beta2, and gamma bands will also be considered. eLORETA will estimate the rsEEG cortical sources. Statistical analysis at the group level (i.e. statistical comparisons among Nold ADD-noEpilepsy and ADD-Epilepsy 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 ADD-noEpilepsy and ADD-Epilepsy individuals. These classifications will be performed by GraphPad Prism software (GraphPad Software, Inc, California, USA).
