EEG Mapping and Low-Resolution Brain Electromagnetic Tomography (LORETA) in Diagnosis and Therapy of Psychiatric Disorders: Evidence for a Key-Lock Principle

Different psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia with predominantly positive and negative symptomatology, major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, agoraphobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, multi-infarct dementia, senile dementia of the Alzheimer type and alcohol dependence, show EEG maps that differ statistically both from each other and from normal controls. Representative drugs of the main psychopharmacological classes, such as sedative and non-sedative neuroleptics and antidepressants, tranquilizers, hypnotics, psychostimulants and cognition-enhancing drugs, induce significant and typical changes to normal human brain function, which in many variables are opposite to the above-mentioned differences between psychiatric patients and normal controls. Thus, by considering these differences between psychotropic drugs and placebo in normal subjects, as well as between mental disorder patients and normal controls, it may be possible to choose the optimum drug for a specific patient according to a keylock principle, since the drug should normalize the deviant brain function. This is supported by 3–dimensional low-resolution brain electromagnetic tomography (LORETA), which identifies regions within the brain that are affected by psychiatric disorders and psychopharmacological substances.