Elevated and Slowed EEG Oscillations in Patients with Post-Concussive Syndrome and Chronic Pain Following a Motor Vehicle Collision

Derrick Matthew Buchanan; Tomas Ros; Richard Nahas

doi:10.3390/brainsci11050537

Elevated and Slowed EEG Oscillations in Patients with Post-Concussive Syndrome and Chronic Pain Following a Motor Vehicle Collision

Brain Sci. 2021 Apr 24;11(5):537. doi: 10.3390/brainsci11050537.

Authors

Derrick Matthew Buchanan^{1

2}, Tomas Ros³, Richard Nahas^{2

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Neuroscience, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON K1S 5B6, Canada.
² The Seekers Centre, Ottawa, ON K1Z 5Z9, Canada.
³ Laboratory for Neurology and Imaging of Cognition, Department of Neurosciences, University of Geneva, CH1202 Geneva, Switzerland.
⁴ Department of Family Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON K1G 5Z3, Canada.

Abstract

(1) Background: Mild traumatic brain injury produces significant changes in neurotransmission including brain oscillations. We investigated potential quantitative electroencephalography biomarkers in 57 patients with post-concussive syndrome and chronic pain following motor vehicle collision, and 54 healthy nearly age- and sex-matched controls. (2) Methods: Electroencephalography processing was completed in MATLAB, statistical modeling in SPSS, and machine learning modeling in Rapid Miner. Group differences were calculated using current-source density estimation, yielding whole-brain topographical distributions of absolute power, relative power and phase-locking functional connectivity. Groups were compared using independent sample Mann-Whitney U tests. Effect sizes and Pearson correlations were also computed. Machine learning analysis leveraged a post hoc supervised learning support vector non-probabilistic binary linear kernel classification to generate predictive models from the derived EEG signatures. (3) Results: Patients displayed significantly elevated and slowed power compared to controls: delta (p = 0.000000, r = 0.6) and theta power (p < 0.0001, r = 0.4), and relative delta power (p < 0.00001) and decreased relative alpha power (p < 0.001). Absolute delta and theta power together yielded the strongest machine learning classification accuracy (87.6%). Changes in absolute power were moderately correlated with duration and persistence of symptoms in the slow wave frequency spectrum (<15 Hz). (4) Conclusions: Distributed increases in slow wave oscillatory power are concurrent with post-concussive syndrome and chronic pain.

Keywords: EEG; car accident; chronic pain; concussion; diffuse brain injury; electroencephalography; motor vehicle collision; post-concussive syndrome; support vector machine.