Autonomic Nervous System Function and EEGs of Children with Developmental Disorders

Abstract

In the August 2016 ISLIS symposium, Kawano discussed the function of the autonomic nervous system developed as a regulating mechanism of life activities by introducing some data of children with developmental disorders. In this report, those data were compared with data of children of normal development and furthermore their EEGs were analyzed. Subjects were 8 children with normal development (N) (average age ± SD; 13.4 ± 2.8y), 11 children with Asperger type disorders (ASD) (13.2 ± 2.9y) and 6 children with attention deficit disorders (ADD) (12.2 ± 2.1y). The experiment was conducted after review by the Ethics Committee of Kasei University, and there were no conflicts of interest to disclose. According to the international 10-20 method, 12 EEG electrodes were put on each subject for EEG measurements; additionally, respiration and SpO2 electrodes were used. First, control data were measured for each subject while in a resting state, listening to music and doing an easy mental calculation. Then, measurements were taken while doing assigned tasks from among the Wechsler type intelligence examination, digit spans (forward and backward), similarities, etc., and other tasks, such as landscape montage, listening to book-reading and composition. The EEG α waves were found to be larger for subjects in the developmental disorder groups. And ratios of the effective α amplitudes on the left and right central areas (C4/C3) were larger for the developmental disorder groups than the N group, especially during the digit span task. It was considered that linguistic thinking dominated more than image thinking for the developmental disorder children. There were more correct answers of the digit span task for the N group, and between the numbers of correct answers and the ratios, C4/C3, an inverse correlation was found. By the peak-to-peak fluctuation analysis of the pulse wave, HF which is an indicator of the parasympathetic nerve system function and LF/HF which is an indicator of the sympathetic nerve system function were calculated. Averages of the heart rates were the lowest for the N group, and the highest for the ADD group. That meant the ADD children seemed to have a slightly stronger tension. However, according to the autonomic nervous system indicators, the sympathetic nervous activities of the N group children were higher while executing tasks than in the resting state, whereas the data of the ADD group children showed a somewhat mood-like fluctuation, and the data of the ASD group children showed only a small change throughout the experiment. As the disorder levels of the subjects in this experiment were extremely mild, those changes had no significant differences. Further experiments and analyses are required.