V20. Gender differences in the quantitative EEG in relaxed states and during cognitive or emotional challenges

There is hardly information on gender differences in the quantitative EEG. However, this issue is important, if a norm database is used for comparison of patient data with those of healthy subjects ( Dimpfel et al., 2014 ). The present retrospective analysis of several clinical studies was undertaken in order to sort out if there are gender dependent quantitative differences in the absolute spectral power in different brain regions. EEG recordings were taken using the CATEEM® technology as described earlier based on 17 electrode positions ( Dimpfel, 2014 ). Spectral power – averaged during recordings of 5 min duration – was compared during relaxed states “eyes open” and “eyes closed” as well as during different cognitive tasks (concentration test, memory test or math calculation) or watching different videos (animal film, comedy film, Disney film, erotic and sex film) or several TV commercials. Data from male and female subjects were grouped and statistically compared for 102 parameters (17 brain regions times six frequency ranges) by Wilkinson–Mann–Whitney nonparametric statistical tests using Bonferroni correction. In addition, data were fed into linear discriminant analysis. First analysis was performed with 143 male and 104 female subjects of our norm database for the recording condition “eyes open”. The comparison revealed that female subjects had considerably higher spectral power in the temporal beta1 and beta2 range with a statistically high significance from p p 3 and T 6 with statistically significant differences between male and female subjects with p Fig. 1 ) or emotional videos (80 subjects) again without any overlap when depicting all single subjects in the discriminant analysis. These observations clearly create a demand for separate consideration of quantitative EEG‘s from patients with regard to gender. If neglected quite a broad scatter of quantitative data can be expected leading to less accurate deviations of focal spectral power from normality.