4.5 Article

Fronto-parietal alpha ERD and visuo-spatial attention in pregnant women

Journal

BRAIN RESEARCH
Volume 1798, Issue -, Pages -

Publisher

ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2022.148130

Keywords

Pregnancy; Attention; Estradiol; Progesterone; Event-related (de-)synchronisation (ERD and ERS)

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Many pregnant women experience impairments in attentional capacities. This study found that pregnant women had increased alpha frequency and a greater magnitude of alpha ERD prior to target-onset, which correlated with improved accuracy in a visuo-spatial attention task. Estradiol levels also showed a negative correlation with accuracy in pregnant women.
Many pregnant women report impairments in their attentional capacities. However, comparative studies between pregnant and non-pregnant women using standardised attention paradigms are rare and inconsistent. During attention tasks alpha activity is known to suppress irrelevant sensory inputs and previous studies show that a large event-related desynchronisation (ERD) in the alpha range prior to target-onset predicts enhanced attentional processing. We quantified the relationship between performance (accuracy, response time) in a standardised visuo-spatial attention task and alpha ERD (similar to 6-12 Hz) as well as saliva estradiol level in fifteen pregnant women (M = 26.6, SD = 3.0 years) compared to fifteen non-pregnant, naturally cycling women (M = 23.1, SD = 4.3 years). Compared to non-pregnant women, alpha frequency was increased in pregnant women. Furthermore, pregnant women showed a greater magnitude of the alpha ERD prior to target-onset and a moderate increase in accuracy compared to non-pregnant women. In addition, accuracy correlated negatively with estradiol in pregnant women as well as with frontal alpha ERD in all women. These correlational findings indicate that pregnancy-related enhancement in alpha desynchmnisation in a fronto-parietal network might modulate accuracy during a visuo-spatial attention task.

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