Atypical temporal-scale-specific fractal changes in Alzheimer’s disease EEG and their relevance to cognitive decline

Abstract

Recent advances in nonlinear analytic methods for electroencephalography have clarified the reduced complexity of spatiotemporal dynamics in brain activity observed in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, there are far fewer studies exploring temporal scale dependent fractal properties in AD, despite the importance of studying the dynamics of brain activity within physiologically relevant frequency ranges. Higuchi’s fractal dimension is a widely used index for evaluating fractality in brain activity, but temporal-scale-specific characteristics are lost due to its requirement of averaging over the entire range of temporal scales. In this study, we adapted Higuchi’s fractal algorithm into a method for investigating temporal-scale-specific fractal properties. We then compared the values of the temporal-scale-specific fractal dimension between healthy control (HC) and AD patient groups. Our data indicate that relative to the HC group, the AD group demonstrated reduced fractality at both slow and fast temporal scales. Moreover, we confirmed that the fractality at fast temporal scales correlates with cognitive decline. These properties might serve as a basis for a useful approach to characterizing temporal neural dynamics in AD or other neurodegenerative disorders.