Characteristic changes in EEG spectral powers of patients with opioid-use disorder as compared with those with methamphetamine- and alcohol-use disorders

Electroencephalography (EEG) likely reflects activity of cortical neurocircuits, making it an insightful estimation for mental health in patients with substance use disorder (SUD). EEG signals are recorded as sinusoidal waves, containing spectral amplitudes across several frequency bands with high spatio-temporal resolution. Prior work on EEG signal analysis has been made mainly at individual electrodes. These signals can be evaluated from advanced aspects, including sub-regional and hemispheric analyses. Due to limitation of computational techniques, few studies in earlier work could conduct data analyses from these aspects. Therefore, EEG in patients with SUD is not fully understood. In the present retrospective study, spectral powers from a data house containing opioid (OUD), methamphetamine/stimulants (MUD), and alcohol use disorder (AUD) were extracted, and then converted into five distinct topographic data (i.e., electrode-based, cortical subregion-based, left-right hemispheric, anterior-posterior based, and total cortex-based analyses). We found that EEG spectral powers in patients with OUD were significantly different from those with MUD or AUD. Differential changes were observed from multiple perspectives, including individual electrodes, subregions, hemispheres, anterior-posterior cortices, and across the cortex as a whole. Understanding the differential changes in EEG signals may be useful for future work with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), not only for diagnostic but also for prognostic purposes in patients with SUD.