Addressing measurement issues in electroencephalography studies of meditations as alternative interventions of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Meditation shows promise for treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but its mechanisms remain poorly understood, hindering its use as an evidence-based clinical intervention. Electroencephalography (EEG) can measure brain network changes during meditation, yet recent meta-analyses report mixed findings, with some consistent enhancements in theta and alpha neural oscillations but many inconsistencies. This commentary identifies critical, often overlooked measurement issues in meditation EEG studies that contribute to replication problems. It reviews physiological artifact-related issues in time, frequency, and time-frequency measures, as well as spatial-domain measurement problems inherent to EEG, and recommends standard EEG processing and analysis methods to resolve these obstacles.

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Abstract

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating mental disorder affecting numerous U.S. citizens, but conventional interventions have shown limited success in treating PTSD symptoms (e.g., high dropout rates). Various meditative techniques have been used as alternative interventions to treat PTSD, demonstrating that these interventions have strong potential to improve symptoms and quality of life in people with PTSD. Despite the initial promise, our limited understanding of the mechanisms of meditation has hindered the establishment of meditation as an evidence-based clinical intervention optimized for trauma survivors. Therefore, it is imperative to determine the neurobiological mechanism of meditation using rigorous functional outcome measures of the central nervous system. Electroencephalography (EEG) has been widely used as an ideal tool for mechanistic studies of meditation because it provides a sensitive functional neural measurement of synchronized brain networks that may reflect meditation-related trait and state changes in brain dynamics. However, recent meta-analyses of EEG meditation studies have provided mixed findings, with some consistencies across (e.g., enhanced theta and alpha frequency neural oscillations) as well as a number of inconsistent findings across studies. The present commentary addresses critical measurement issues in meditation EEG studies that are often disregarded and thus underlie the replication problems, which represent one of the major obstacles in mechanistic studies of meditation using EEG. In particular, the physiological artifact-related issues in time, frequency, and time-frequency measures and spatial-domain measurement problems inherent to EEG are reviewed, and standard methods of EEG processing and analysis are recommended to resolve the problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).