Altered motor performance in Alzheimer's disease: a dynamic analysis using EEG

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive memory impairment and cognitive deficits. Many previous studies assumed stationarity of the brain activity while quantifying differences between AD patients and controls. However, the human brain is a dynamic system, and cognitive processes may change at sub-second timescale. The main objective of this study is to investigate the advantage of dynamic analysis over static analysis in detecting the brain alterations occurred in AD. Therefore, using electroencephalography data recorded from 10 AD patients and 12 healthy elderly controls while performing a motor task, we investigated the channel-level differences in voltage distribution between AD and controls with both, static and dynamic approaches. While static analysis showed similar response for both groups, dynamic analysis revealed significant differences in different brain regions during the first 200 ms following stimulus onset. These findings highlight the necessity of adopting a dynamic analysis when exploring brain activity differences between AD and controls.