Effect of alterations in breathing patterns on EEG activity in normal human subjects

Hypoxemia, hyper/hypocapnia due to altered respiratory patterns in patients with chronic respiratory ailments cause changes in cortical functions leading to encepalopathy. But presence of other simultaneous confounding factors in these patients makes it difficult to understand the effect of different breathing patterns alone on cortical areas. Therefore, the present study aim to investigate the effect of different breathing patterns on alpha and beta activity over different brain regions in normal human subjects. To achieve this, thirty healthy male subjects were asked to perform 3-minutes of slow deep breathing (SDB), Breath holding (BH) and fast deep breathing (FDB) while EEG was recorded at frontal, parietal and occipital sites. Percent change in power reveal that both alpha and beta activities increased following FDB in the frontal region (approx 4010% at F3 & 2515% at F4) whereas, they decreased in all the regions post BH but only alpha decreased posteriorly post SDB (up to 205% at P3 & 185% at P4). Therefore, alterations in post-interventional cortical EEG activities seems to have alpha preponderance which might be sensitive to relative hypoxemia/ hypercapnia or hypocapnia, having differential response to the respiratory interventions.