A Study on the Possible Usefulness of Detrended Fluctuation Analysis of the Electroencephalogram Background Activity in Alzheimer´s Disease

We studied the EEG background activity of Alzheimer´s disease (AD) patients with detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA). DFA provides an estimation of the scaling information and long-range correlations in time series. We recorded the EEG in 11 AD patients and 11 age-matched controls. Our results showed two scaling regions in all subjects´ channels (for limited time scales from 0.01 to 0.04 s and from 0.08 to 0.43 s, respectively), with a clear bend when their corresponding slopes (alpha₁ and alpha₂) were different. No significant differences between groups were found with alpha₁. However, alpha₂ values were significantly lower in control subjects at electrodes T5, T6, and O1 ( p <0.01, Student´s -test). These findings suggest that the scaling behavior of the EEG is sensitive to AD. Although values allowed us to separate AD patients and controls, accuracies were lower than with spectral analysis. However, a forward stepwise linear discriminant analysis with a leave-one-out cross-validation procedure showed that the combined use of DFA and spectral analysis could improve the diagnostic accuracy of each individual technique. Thus, although spectral analysis outperforms DFA, the combined use of both techniques may increase the insight into brain dysfunction in AD.