• Korean Journal of Biological Psychiatry
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• v.4 no.1
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• pp.67-73
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• 1997

The changes of electroencephalogram(EEG) in patients with dementia are most commonly studied by analyzing power or magnitude in certain traditionally defined frequency bands. However because of the absence of an identified metric which quantifies the complex amount of information, there are many limitations in using such a linear method. According to chaos theory, irregular signals of EEG can also result from low dimensional deterministic chaos. Chaotic nonlinear dynamics in the EEG can be studied by calculating the correlation dimension. The authors have analyzed EEG epochs from three patients with dementia of Alzheimer type and three matched control subjects. The multichannel correlation dimension is calculated from EEG epochs consisting of 15 channels with 16,384 data points per channel. The results showed that patients with dementia of Alzheimer type had significantly lower correlation dimension than non-demented controls on 12 channels. Topographic analysis showed that the correlation dimensions were significantly lower in patients with Alzheimer's disease on frontal, temporal, central, and occipital head regions. These results show that brains of patients with dementia of Alzheimer type have a decreased complexity of electrophysiological behavior. We conclude that the nonlinear analysis such as calculating correlation dimension can be a promising tool for detecting relative changes in the complexity of brain dynamics.