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Assessment of post-excitatory long-interval cortical inhibition in adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder

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Abstract

In order to further examine cortical impairment in adult ADHD patients and to test the hypothesis of a disturbed neuronal inhibition in adults with ADHD, late auditory evoked potentials were measured. By using paired-chirp auditory late responses, we compared 15 adults with ADHD with 15 control subjects, focusing on the inhibition elicited by the stimuli. Besides amplitude measurements, a time–frequency phase coherence study using the wavelet phase synchronization stability (WPSS) was performed. ADHD was diagnosed according to DSM-IV criteria. All ADHD subjects were without medication and did not suffer from any further axis I disorder. WPSS analysis revealed impaired auditory inhibition for ADHD patients for interstimulus intervals (ISI) between 500 and 1,100 ms as compared with healthy controls. By analyzing the WPSS in the interval from 80 ms to 220 ms, mean inhibition of the test chirp was found to be 6% in the ADHD group and 38.5% in the control subjects (p = 0.01). Moreover, overall smaller amplitudes in the N100 and P200 waves at all ISI were found (p = 0.04 and p = 0.02). However, reproducibility indices in the amplitude measurements were low, thus supporting the use of the instantaneous phase-based analysis method. The results support the hypothesis of reduced intracortical inhibition as a correlate of disturbed brain function in adults with ADHD.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all the staff at SNN-Unit and the Neurocenter at Saarland University Hospital for all their support before, during and after the research, being subjects or collaborating with the data acquisition and/or processing. Special thanks to Dr. Farah I. Corona-Strauss for providing the chirp files.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Forensic Psychology and Psychiatry, Neurocentre, Saarland University Hospital, Bdg. 90.3, 66424, Homburg/Saar, Germany

    Wolfgang Retz, Konstanze D. Römer, Florence Philipp-Wiegmann, Philip Reinert, Samir Boureghda & Michael Rösler

  2. Systems Neuroscience and Neurotechnology Unit, Neurocentre, Saarland University Hospital, Homburg, Germany

    Ernesto González-Trejo, Yin Fen Low & Daniel J. Strauss

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  1. Wolfgang Retz
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  2. Ernesto González-Trejo
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Correspondence to Wolfgang Retz.

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Retz, W., González-Trejo, E., Römer, K.D. et al. Assessment of post-excitatory long-interval cortical inhibition in adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 262, 507–517 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-012-0299-6

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