Slowing of EEG waves correlates with striatal [18F]fluorodopa PET/CT
uptake and executive dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease
Abstract
Multimodal studies evaluating associations between specific for
Parkinson’s disease (PD) neuroimaging and neurophysiological biomarkers
in revealing executive dysfunction mechanisms are scarce and needed to
be validated. Hence, our study aimed to evaluate associations between
electroencephalographic power spectral density (PSD-EEG), striatal
[18F]Fluorodopa uptake and neuropsychological testing parameters in
PD. Additional aim was to estimate PD diagnostic accuracy of the PSD-EEG
parameters. We compared resting PSD-EEG, striatal [18F]Fluorodopa
uptake ratio with positron emission computed tomography ([18F]FDOPA
PET/CT), and neuropsychological test outcomes between PD patients and
healthy controls, and then calculated correlations among these outcomes.
Additionally we estimated PD diagnostic sensitivity and specificity
(with the receiver operating characteristic curves) of the PSD-EEG
parameters in reference to the gold diagnostic standard of the striatal
[18F]FDOPA PET/CT uptake ratio.PD patients exhibited (i) increased
power of the EEG theta and lower-alpha bands in the frontal lobe areas,
(ii) decreased putaminal and caudate nuclei [18F]FDOPA PET/CT uptake
ratios and (iii) longer performance times of part A and B of the Trail
Making Test (TMT-A and TMT-B). Most of the PSD-EEG parameters negatively
correlated with striatal [18F]FDOPA PET/CT uptake ratios and
positively correlated with TMT-A and TMT-B. Furthermore, [18F]FDOPA
PET/CT uptake ratios positively correlated with TMT-A and TMT-B. Theta
and lower-alpha bands PSD-EEG were found to have high diagnostic
accuracy. Our findings showed that slowing of EEG waves in the frontal
lobe was correlated with striatal dopaminergic deficiency and executive
dysfunction in mild PD patients, and appears to be a promising biomarker
of PD-related executive dysfunction.