The electroencephalographic (EEG) patterns induced by the pyretic drugs may consist of the several elementary waves such as that representing their direct action on CNS (central nervous system), that representing the passive reactivity to the hyperthermic state as expressed by the Arrhenius equation (1-3), that representing the active reactivity due to the activity of thermoregulatory center in the hyperthermic state, and so on, though the superposition of each elementary wave might not be always linear.
In this respect, the fact that the fluctuation in the EEG patterns caused by the hypothalamic heating at variable degrees as reported by von Euler
et al. (4) is quite suggestive, because there is an increase of frequency of spindle bursts in cortex with a moderate heating, while there is an arousal pattern with an excessive heating in their experiment.
Bovet and Longo (5) noted that the spindle burst is characteristic to the brain wave in the normal rabbit, and jasper (6) rendered it connect with the alpha rhythm in the human EEG, and more recently Hess
et al. (7), Ralston and Ajmone-Marsan (8), and Chow
et al. (9) assumed it as a sleep spindle. In those cases it should be also emphasized that the spindle burst is somewhat related to the activity of thermoregulatory center.
The pyretic drugs is considered to cause a deviation from the steady state of heat production and heat dissipation activity of the effector organs by giving the perturbation to the thermoregulatory homeostatic system of the body.
In this report, the author aimed to study the frequency distribution of spindle bursts per unit time during the control period and after 2, 4-dinitrophenol administration and their statistical properties as a preliminary experiment for the purpose of further precise analysis of the correlation between the activity of CNS and that of thermoregulatory effector organs, and also for the purpose of the prediction of forthcoming EEG change during the control period with necessity to detect the drug effect more efficiently and more accurately.
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