Dysfunctional cortical inhibition in adult ADHD: neural correlates in auditory event-related potentials

Abstract

In recent times, the relevance of an accurate diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in adults has been the focus of several studies. No longer considered a pathology exclusive to children and adolescents, and taking into account its social implications, developing enhanced support tools for the current diagnostic procedure becomes a priority. Here we present a method for the objective assessment of ADHD in adults using chirp-evoked, paired auditory late responses (ALRs) combined with a two-dimensional ALR denoising scheme to extract correlates of intracortical inhibition. Our method allows for an effective single-sweep denoising, thus requiring less trials to obtain recognizable physiological features, useful as pointers of cortical impairment. Results allow an optimized diagnosis, reduction of data loss and acquisition time; moreover, they do not account exclusively for critical elements within clinical evaluations, but also allow studying the pathophysiology of the condition by providing objective information regarding impaired cortical functions.

Keywords: Attention deficit; Denoising; Event-related potentials; Non-local means.