Quantitative EEG analysis at rest and during photic stimulation in drug-naive patients with first-episode paranoid...

In the present study, quantitative EEG analysis was performed at rest and during 10 Hz photic stimulation in 14 drug-naive patients with first-episode paranoid schizophrenia and 20 sex- and age-matched control subjects. Compared with the normal controls, the patients had significantly lower alpha-2 band amplitude in the resting EEG over all recording regions. No significant group differences were found in other frequency bands. In addition, EEG analysis during photic stimulation demonstrated that the patients had a rather uniform topographic profile in EEG amplitude for the alpha band, with significant group differences being confined to the posterior regions in the left hemisphere. There were no significant group differences in the amplitude for the frequency bands harmonically related to the stimulus frequency. These findings provide further evidence that schizophrenic patients have abnormal EEG activity in both non-stimulus and stimulus conditions, and suggest a dysfunction in the mechanisms underlying EEG alpha generation in schizophrenia.