Differences in stimulus evoked electroencephalographic entropy reduction distinguishes cognitively normal Parkinson’s disease participants from healthy aged-matched controls

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease best known for its defining motor symptoms. However, it is also associated with significant cognitive impairment at all stages of the disease, with many patients eventually progressing to dementia. Therefore, there exists a significant need to identify objective functional biomarkers that better predict and monitor cognitive decline. While methods that analyse either spontaneous or evoked EEG, due to increasing practical usability and ostensible objectivity, have been investigated, current approaches are limited in that the associated measures are, in the absence of a theoretical basis, purely correlative. To address this shortcoming, we propose calculating changes in evoked EEG amplitude variability, quantified using information theoretic differential entropy (DE), during a three-level passive auditory oddball task, as it is argued this will directly index functional changes in cognition. We therefore estimate changes in stimulus-evoked DE in cognitively normal PD participants (n = 25), both on and off their medication, and in healthy age-matched controls (n = 25), and find substantial stimulus (standard, target, novel) and group differences. Notably, we find the time-course of the return of post-stimulus reductions in DE (i.e., information processing) to pre-stimulus levels delayed in PD compared to healthy controls, thus mirroring the assumed bradyphrenia. The observed changes in DE, together with the corollary increases in resting alpha (8 – 13 Hz) band activity seen in PD, are explained in the context of a well-known macroscopic theory of mammalian electrocortical activity, in terms of reduced tonic thalamo-cortical drive. This method of task-evoked DE EEG amplitude variability is expected to generalise to any situation where the objective determination of cognitive function is sought.