Exploring Differences in the Lateralized Readiness Potential in Persons With Multiple Sclerosis Compared to Healthy...

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Neurology

Background:

• Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a neurodegenerative condition causing significant cognitive and motor deficits.
• Neural mechanisms underlying motor preparation and initiation impairments in MS remain under-researched.
• The lateralized readiness potential (LRP) offers insights into pre-motor and motor activation processes.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate differences in motor preparation and initiation neural activity between individuals with MS and healthy controls (HC).
• To examine the lateralized readiness potential stimulus (LRP-S) and lateralized readiness potential response (LRP-R) components in MS.
• To correlate neural activity indices with behavioral performance in a selective attention task.

Main Methods:

• Recruitment of 53 individuals with MS and 53 HC.
• Concurrent electroencephalography (EEG) and flanker task performance for LRP extraction.
• Paired t-tests and Pearson correlations to analyze differences and relationships between neural and behavioral data.

Main Results:

• Individuals with MS exhibited delayed LRP-S latency and reduced LRP-R amplitudes compared to HC.
• LRP-S latency positively correlated with reaction time in both groups.
• Incongruent LRP-R latency negatively correlated with reaction time in both groups, indicating faster responses with shorter activation-response intervals.

Conclusions:

• MS is associated with delayed response selection and diminished neural response activation.
• Impairments in MS affect both pre-motor and motor response initiation during selective attention.
• The relationship between neural action components and task performance differs between individuals with MS and HC.