Electro-encephalographic recordings were made on 38 children with clinical symptoms of Lennox syndrome. In 33 of these cases longitudinal studies were done over an average of 2½ years. A typical spike-wave-variant pattern appeared in only 24 % of the cases at the initial examination. Of the remaining subjects who were followed-up, 52 % showed a pattern of this kind in later EEG recordings. The brain-wave pictures of 76 % of all patients followed up underwent a change from one examination to another. The most frequent change was an alternation of the diffuse and focal - often side-changing - hypersynchronous potentials. The pathogenetic mechanism of this change, which has also been observed by other workers, remains obscure.
In this observational study the outcomes of an EEG-based infra-low-frequency (ILF) neurofeedback intervention on patients with attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder (ADHD) are presented. The question is addressed whether this computer-aided treatment, which uses a brain-computer-interface to alleviate the clinical symptoms of mental disorders, is an effective non-pharmaceutical therapy for ADHD in childhood and adolescence. In a period of about 15 weeks 196 ADHD patients were treated with about 30 sessions of ILF neurofeedback in an ambulant setting. Besides regular evaluation of the severity of clinical symptoms, a continuous performance test (CPT) for parameters of attention and impulse control was conducted before and after the neurofeedback treatment. During and after the therapy, the patients did not only experience a substantial reduction in the severity of their ADHD-typical clinical symptoms, but also their performance in a continuous test procedure was significantly improved for all examined parameters of attention and impulse control, like response time, variability of reaction time, omission errors and commission errors. In a post neurofeedback intervention assessment 97% of patients reported improvement in symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity or impulsivity. Only 3% of the patients claimed no noticeable alleviation of ADHD-related symptoms. These results suggest that ILF neurofeedback is a clinically effective method that can be considered as a treatment option for ADHD and might help reducing or even avoiding psychotropic medication.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neural and mental developmental disorder that impacts brain connectivity and information processing. Although application of the infra-low frequency (ILF) neurofeedback procedure has been shown to lead to significant changes in functional connectivity in multiple areas and neuronal networks of the brain, rather limited data are available in the literature for the efficacy of this technique in a therapeutic context to treat ASD. Here we present the case study of a 5-year-old boy with ASD, who received a treatment of 26 sessions of ILF neurofeedback over a 6-month period. A systematic and quantitative tracking of core ASD symptoms in several categories was used to document behavioral changes over time. The ILF neurofeedback intervention decreased the average symptom severity of every category to a remarkable degree, with the strongest effect (80 and 77% mean severity reduction) for physical and sleep symptoms and the lowest influence on behavioral symptoms (15% mean severity reduction). This case study is representative of clinical experience, and thus shows that ILF neurofeedback is a practical and effective therapeutic instrument to treat ASD in children.
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