Is there a cluster of high theta-beta ratio patients in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?

Abstract

OBJECTIVE It has been suggested that there exists a subgroup of ADHD patients that have a high theta-beta ratio (TBR). The aim of this study was to analyze the distribution of TBR values in ADHD patients and validate the presence of a high-TBR cluster using objective metrics. METHODS The TBR was extracted from eyes-open resting state EEG recordings of 363 ADHD patients, aged 5-21 years. The TBR distribution was estimated with three Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Models (BGMMs) with one, two, and three components, respectively. The pairwise comparison of BGMMs was carried out with deviance tests to identify the number of components that best represented the data. RESULTS The two-component BGMM modeled the TBR values significantly better than the one-component BGMM (p-value = 0.005). No significant difference was observed between the two-component and three-component BGMM (p-value = 0.850). CONCLUSION These results suggest that there exist indeed two TBR clusters within the ADHD population. SIGNIFICANCE This work offers a global framework to understanding values found in the literature and suggest guidelines on how to compute theta-beta ratio values. Moreover, using objective data-driven method we confirm the existence of a high theta-beta ratio cluster.