What's New in Neurofeedback

Sleep disturbances associated with ADHD: psychiatric comorbidity & pharmacotherapy. : Sleep difficulties are common in ADHD youths, but these are mostly attributable to anxiety and behavioral disorder comorbidity and stimulant medication.

Improvement/Rehabilitation of Memory Functioning with Neurotherapy/QEEG Biofeedback. : Remediation of memory deficits by applying a QEEG database guided biofeedback protocol is described in a number of cases. Improvements ranged from 68% to 181% in the group of patients with brain injury as a result of the interventions.

Does cognitive impairment cause poststroke depression? : Poststroke major depression leads to cognitive impairment and not vice versa.

Topographic mapping of brain potentials in the newborn infant : Quantitative EEG analysis was superior to clinical EEG, neuroultrasound, and CT in identifying infants with neurological abnormalities.

Inhibitory control in children with TBI or ADHD : Slowing of information processing speed is often a general consequence of TBI in childhood, whereas slowing of the stop-processes (inhibitory deficits) are associated with post-injury hypo- or hyperactivity.

SPECT, MR and quantitative MR imaging in traumatic brain injury. : Each neuroimaging modality detected brain abnormalities in a population of 52 traumatically brain injured patients that the other two did not. QMR and MR abnormalities correlated with intellectual and memory outcome whereas SPECT did not.

Sleep disturbances and psychiatric disorders associated with PTSD : Sleep disturbances affected 70% of PTSD subjects including injurious behaviors during sleep, sleep paralysis, sleep talking, and hypnagogic hallucinations

Controlled trial of daily left prefrontal cortex TMS for treating depression. : In a controlled research design, daily left prefrontal TMS for 2 weeks was found to reduce depression symptoms greater than did sham training.

Regional cerebral metabolism associated with anxiety symptoms : Depression ratings correlated with activity in bilateral medial frontal, right anterior cingulate, and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. Anxiety scores correlated with activity in other regions entirely.

The 9th Annual Winter Brain 2001 Neurofeedback and Brain Sciences Meeting, Feb 2-6, 2001 Miami FL
Lectures on Peak Performance, QEEG, ADDHD, Transpersonal experience, and more. Selected speakers include Karl Pribram, Thom Hartmann, Jay Gunkelman, Robert Gurnee, Joel & Judith Lubar, Sig and Sue Othmer, & Barry Sterman. Includes 30+ workshops and an exhibit hall.

The World Medical Association just met in Edinburgh to update the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki on clinical research ethics, and the new rules are even more specific with respect to placebo controlled designs. If there are recognized treatments available for a condition, then any new approach needs to be tested against the best available treatment rather than against placebo. This is simply a matter of ethics of patient care. One may not leave patients worse off for being part of a study.

Actually this "policy" has been in place at the United Nations since 1964, and existing FDA and NIH research procedures were blatantly inconsistent with it. It was as a result of an attempt by U.S. researchers to establish a beachhead for placebo-trials in situations where "they don't cause death or disability" that brought about the opposite effect, an unambiguous stiffening of the ethical proscription against placebo trials. In view of the fact that FDA officials made an impassioned case at the WMA meeting for the legitimacy of placebo-controlled trials, it is all the more remarkable that they did not include a placebo cohort in the "Multi-site Study" of ADHD cited in the above study.

With respect to the new research standards, "we" (in the neurofeedback community) don't stack up badly. There are already several studies that compare neurofeedback for ADHD with the best available treatment, i.e. stimulus medication. These are the studies by Rossiter and LaVaque and the Ph.D. thesis by Thomas Fuchs. The latter is available on the EEG Spectrum website. The former can be found on the SNR-JNT website. A comparison with an active control, in this case an ordinary video game, is to be found in the Ph.D. thesis by Cartozzo. Ironically, some behavioral measures responded favorably to the ordinary video game control, so much so that there was no significant treatment interaction for those measures!

One may also consider the published report by Lynda and Michael Thompson as relevant. The cohort of 36 children that was on medication at the start of neurofeedback could be considered a kind of "within-subject" medication control. 30 of these 36 children no longer required medication by the end of training. Finally, the study at Cal Poly in 1985 undertook neurofeedback with a cohort in which 85% children were medicated, some 15% with more than one medication. Yet hyperactivity improved at the 0.01 level of significance in this group with the neurofeedback training.

For more information on this topic, see the article "Helsinki's New Clinical Rules: Fewer Placebos, More Disclosure; Science, 290, 20 October 2000, 418-419. www.sciencemag.org