08 January 2007
BM-Science advanced EEG analyses reveal an important finding in psychopharmacology (in press in International Journal of Psychophysiology).
It was shown that methadone restores not only the composition of EEG oscillations and their percentage ration in the overall EEG but it also restores the temporal structure of the EEG signal. This latter aspect is of particular interest:
It was recently suggested that a pathological process is a process where there is a change in the temporal dynamics from what is normal, rather than in the regularity or irregularity of those dynamics.
More and more research (see review Fingelkurts et al., 2005) emphasize that the majority of brain and psychiatric/mental problems are accompanied by a disruption in the temporal structure of brain activity, i.e. the temporal reorganization in the brain dynamics was indeed observed in opioid addiction. It was suggested that this type of temporal reorganization is a contributing factor to the disorganization syndrome in drug addiction and reward regulation (Fingelkurts et al., 2006).
Therefore, psychotropic drugs, which can restore the normal temporal structure of brain activity, are of particular interest. To our knowledge, this is the first study where the capability of methadone to restore the normal temporal structure of the brain’s activity was explicitly demonstrated.