The most common cause of progressive neurodegenerative disorder among the elderly individuals is Alzheimer’s disease. Due to the rapidly ageing population, this disease is becoming a growing social and economic burden. Unfortunately, molecular underpinnings are not fully explained and no cure has been discovered yet, thus early diagnosis in the nascent stages of the disease is of crucial importance to enable patients and their family to prepare for the future in time, and to start with the disease modifying therapy. Various promising biomarkers in preclinical stages of AD have been suggested, and among them EEG proves as an appealing potential method for understanding AD. This noninvasive, cost-effective tool has been used for several decades, however, there is a need for its reappraisal or critical validation as a proposed method.
This thesis presents a cross-sectional pilot study on the use of one of the event-related potentials, P3, in differentiating healthy elderly people from people with the probable Alzheimer’s type dementia. The study aimed to answer the following research question: which combination or individual parameter of P3 (latency or amplitude), what type of stimuli (frequent, target, distractor), and which modality (auditory or visual) of the oddball task is best for significant differentiation between a patient with probable AD and a healthy individual. Results showed that the variables that statistically significantly contributed (p < 0.05) to the clarification of the model were the visual amplitude of targets, the auditory latency of targets, and the visual amplitude of frequent stimuli. This model correctly classified 87.7 % participants in total.
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