Karolina Lorek

and 6 more

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.