The Auditory Oddball Paradigm in Patients with Vascular Cognitive Impairment: A Prolonged Latency of the N₂ Complex

Abstract

Objective: The event-related potential (ERP) evoked by the auditory oddball paradigm has been investigated mainly in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and in patients with different causes of subcortical dementia. Subcortical ischemic vascular disease (SIVD) seems to be an important cause of vascular cognitive impairment (VCI) frequently not fulfilling the criteria for dementia. Recognition of VCI is needed in order to provide adequate care and therapy. The aim of this study was to investigate the diagnostic value of the different elements of this response (N₁, N₂ complex and P₃ latencies) in a group of elderly patients with VCI caused by SIVD. Methods: The study population consisted of patients with a clinical and neuropsychological diagnosis of VCI caused by SIVD (n = 38) and healthy control subjects (n = 53) aged 60 years or older. The mean Mini Mental State Examination score of both groups was 27.6, and the mean HIV Dementia Scale score was 6.1 in the patient group and 12.3 in the control group. In all subjects, the ERP was recorded under standardized conditions, and the latencies and amplitudes of N₁, N₂ and P₃ were analyzed by two clinical neurophysiologists in consensus. Both were blinded to the diagnosis. Results: The N₂ latency was significantly longer in patients with VCI than in age-matched controls, whereas the latencies of the P₃ and N₁ were not significantly different. The peak-to-peak amplitude of the N₂ complex to the P₃ wave was significantly lower in the patient group. White matter abnormalities on MRI were not significantly correlated with the N₂ latency. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the latency of the N₂ complex is prolonged and the peak-to-peak amplitude of the N₂ complex to the P₃ wave is lowered in patients with VCI caused by SIVD.

Understanding brain function in vascular cognitive impairment and dementia with EEG and MEG: A systematic review

“…Seven articles were included in this section. Three studies were based on visual tasks recorded with EEG ( Beuzeron-Mangina and Mangina, 2009 , Rosengarten et al, 2007 , Xu et al, 2012 ), 3 on auditory tasks, also with EEG ( Jiang et al, 2017 , Van Harten et al, 2006 , Yamaguchi et al, 2000 ), and 1 on auditory and somatosensory tasks recorded with MEG ( Sun et al, 2013 ). The literature on ERP was highly heterogeneous with respect to experimental conditions, events considered in each study, and types of analyses, so aggregating the results was a challenging task, consequently results generalization should be done with special caution.…”

The development of the N1 and N2 components in auditory oddball paradigms: a systematic review with narrative analysis and suggested normative values

“…This fact, suggests that in the last decades N1 and N2 components have been studied as possible endophenotypes or bio-markers for different disorders and in some cases for recovery index: namely, in schizophrenia (Hegerl et al 1988;Haig et al 1997;Potts et al 1998a;Shelley et al 1999;Ford et al 2001;Brown et al 2002;Gilmore et al 2005;Neuhaus et al 2013), dementia (Verma et al 1989), Alzheimer (Sumi et al 2000), epilepsy and AED effects (Akaho 1996;Ford et al 2001;Lucchesi et al 2003), alcohol (Brigham et al 1997;Cohen et al 2002) and substance abuse (Tarter et al 1995;Brigham et al 1997), psychosis (Valkonen-Korhonen et al 2003), panic disorder (Wise et al 2009), Parkinson's disease (Wright et al (1996), ADHD (Johnstone et al 2001;Tsai et al 2012), stroke (Hirata et al 1996) and vascular cognitive impairment (van Harten et al 2006), myotonic dystrophy (Kazis et al 1996;Tanaka et al 2012), head injury (Reinvang et al 2000;Segalowitz et al 2001), (Guney et al 2009), amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Ogawa et al 2009) and multiple sclerosis (Whelan et al 2010), more recently fragile X syndrome treatment (Schneider et al 2013), and bipolar disorder (Hamm et al 2013). …”

Male patient with mild cognitive impairment and extremely high P300 and Slow-wave latencies: a case report

“…P300 latency may increase slightly in minor ischemic stroke and this increase is associated with post-stroke depression [12], which was not diagnosed in our patient. No increased P300 latency has been observed in patients with vascular cognitive impairment [13]. It is also interesting to note that the high values of P300 and SW latencies were not accompanied by an increase in N200 latency, which implies that the mechanism of production of the N200 wave is independent of that of the two sequential waves.…”