Psychiatric assessment of healthy children with various EEG patterns

A sample of 222 health children, 112 girls and 110 boys, aged 5--16 years, with different types of EEG pattern, were investigated by current child-psychiatric methods. The children were recruited from a large material of children selected in accordance with strict criteria of normality from the paediatric and neurological points of view (Petersén & Eeg-Olofsson (1970/71)). The aim of the child-psychiatric assessment was to find out whether any clinical correlation with the EEG patterns could be shown. First of all, 96 children with some form of EEG deviation were included. Besides these, 126 children with normal EEG were recruited at random from the material. In this selected material significant relations emerged between clinical variables and EEG patterns. Normal EEG showed negative correlations with child-psychiatric variables, while deviating EEG patterns were positively correlated. Many of the correlations disappeared in the oldest age group.