Biomarkers of memory variability in traumatic brain injury

Abstract

Traumatic brain injury is a leading cause of cognitive disability and is often associated with significant impairment in episodic memory. In traumatic brain injury survivors, as in healthy controls, there is marked variability between individuals in memory ability. Using recordings from indwelling electrodes, we characterized and compared the oscillatory biomarkers of mnemonic variability in two cohorts of epilepsy patients: a group with a history of moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (n = 37) and a group of controls without traumatic brain injury (n = 111) closely matched for demographics and electrode coverage. Analysis of these recordings demonstrated that increased high-frequency power and decreased theta power across a broad set of brain regions mark periods of successful memory formation in both groups. As features in a logistic-regression classifier, spectral power biomarkers effectively predicted recall probability, with little difference between traumatic brain injury patients and controls. The two groups also displayed similar patterns of theta-frequency connectivity during successful encoding periods. These biomarkers of successful memory, highly conserved between traumatic brain injury patients and controls, could serve as the basis for novel therapies that target disordered memory across diverse forms of neurological disease.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Dec 15, 2020
Source ID
10.1093/braincomms/fcaa202

Entities

People

  • Barbara C. Jobst
  • Bradley C Lega
  • Ethan A Solomon
  • Kan Ding
  • Michael J. Kahana
  • Paul A. Wanda
  • Ramon Diaz-Arrastia
  • Richard Adamovich-zeitlin
  • Robert E Gross
  • Tung Phan

Organizations

  • Dartmouth–Hitchcock Medical Center
  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Emory University
  • University of Pennsylvania
  • University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Medicine
  • Psychology

Readers

  • Brain and Cognitive Science; Experimental Psychology; Cognitive Neuroscience
  • Neuroscience
  • Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and Cognitive Aging in the Guam and Border Populations Affected by Alzheimer's Disease and Tau-Associated Dementias.