Pigs as a translational animal model for the study of peak alpha frequency

The most characteristic feature of the human electroencephalogram is the peak alpha frequency (PAF). While PAF has been proposed as a biomarker in several diseases and disorders, the disease mechanisms modulating PAF, as well as its physiological substrates, remain elusive. This has partly been due to challenges related to experimental manipulation and invasive procedures in human neuroscience, as well as the scarcity of animal models where PAF is consistently present in resting-state. With the potential inclusion of PAF in clinical screening and decision-making, advancing the mechanistic understanding of PAF is warranted. In this paper, we propose the female Danish Landrace pig as a suitable animal model to probe the mechanisms of PAF and its feature as a biomarker. We show that somatosensory alpha oscillations are present in anesthetized pigs using electrocorticography and intracortical electrodes located at the sensorimotor cortex. This was evident when looking at the time-domain as well as the spectral morphology of spontaneous recordings. We applied the FOOOF-algorithm to extract the spectral characteristics and implemented a robustness threshold for any periodic component. Using this conservative threshold, PAF was present in 18/20 pigs with a normal distribution of the peak frequency between 8-12 Hz, producing similar findings to human recordings. We show that PAF was present in 69.6 % of epochs of approximately six-minute-long resting-state recordings. In sum, we propose that the pig is a suitable candidate for investigating the neural mechanisms of PAF as a biomarker for disease and disorders such as pain, neuropsychiatric disorders, and response to pharmacotherapy.