Effects of Psychotropic Drugs on Quantitative EEG among Patients with Schizophrenia-spectrum Disorders

OBJECTIVE: We examined how psychotropic medications affected quantitative EEG (qEEG) results among patients with a schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. METHODS: The drugs were clustered into nine groups depending on their mechanism. We hypothesized that drugs would affect the relative power shown in qEEG results independently and investigated the effect of each drug group on relative power using multiple linear regression analysis and independent samples t-tests. RESULTS: We found that antipsychotics other than clozapine induced an increase in the relative power of alpha activity. Clozapine markedly increased slow waves and decreased alpha activity in the occipital area. The main findings for antidepressants and antiepileptic drugs were the beta increment and lithium increased the power of delta and theta activity. However, we found no evident changes in power due to benzodiazepine. CONCLUSION: Our results are generally consistent with previous pharmaco-EEG studies, despite some differences. Therefore, the EEG effect in each drug group could be singled out even under the polypharmacy condition, with the possible exception of benzodiazepines. Our results support using a new methodological approach to identify the qEEG effects of various psychotropic drugs in clinical settings.

Computerized EEG and Neuropsychopharmacology / 대한정신약물학회지

In parallel to rapid popularization of personal computers, EEG studies in psychiatric field have become one of important and indispensable methods particularly because of appearance of topographical imaging of scalp EEG b ased on quantitative techaics of convational qualitative ones. Pharmaco-EEG has been an example of quantitative EEG, which is quite useful in objectively predicting clinical efficacies of newly developed substance in healthy subject before giving it to patient with supposed targel from animal experiments. It is also usable in predicting clinical outcomes of psychotic disorder only single dose administration of the drug selected for the treatment. It may be quite evident that we have not necessarily to interpret EEG tracings by replacing them with EEG imagings, which are comparable to the other brain imagings such as CT, SPECT, PET and MRl. The author has proposed the creation of tele-EEG network systems through telephone line in near future.