Enhanced frontoparietal synchronized activation during the wake-sleep transition in patients with primary insomnia.

Introduction: Cognitive and brain hyperactivation have been associated with trouble falling asleep and sleep misperception in patients with primary insomnia (PI). Activation and synchronization/temporal coupling in frontal and frontoparietal regions involved in executive control and endogenous attention might be implicated in these symptoms.

Methods: Standard polysomnography (PSG) and electroencephalogram (EEG) were recorded in 10 unmedicated young patients (age 19-34 yr) with PI with no other sleep/medical condition, and in 10 matched control subjects.

A pre-task resting condition neither 'baseline' nor 'zero'.

This study introduce the comparison of a 'reference state' versus a resting condition (zero), defined upon normative developmental equations. We compared pre-task 'resting' data from healthy individuals with the Normative Cuban digital resting EEG-database recently calculated for VARETA (qEEG/VARETA). The results allowed us to state that a 'pre-task resting conditions' exists as a state beyond the 'zero' or 'baseline' condition.

Wisconsin Card Sorting Test synchronizes the prefrontal, temporal and posterior association cortex in different frequency ranges and extensions.

Current findings show some brain regions consistently related to performance of the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). An increase of local cerebral blood flow or metabolic demands has been detected in those regions. Functional integration of the neuronal circuits that subserve the task performance, based upon the identification of the oscillations and their distributed cerebral sources, has not been accomplished previously.