Hyperventilation Unmasks Convergent Aperiodic EEG Vulnerability in Seizure Disorder and Schizophrenia

A study examined how the brain responds to a hyperventilation test using EEG recordings in 14,905 patients aged 1 to 88 years. Researchers created reference charts for normal changes in reactivity across the lifespan and compared them with patients with seizure disorders (115 patients) and schizophrenia (154 patients). They found that in adolescence (around age 12), the brain reached a critical inflection point. Although both disorders showed different patterns in oscillatory brain parameters, both converged on reduced reactivity in aperiodic parameters with large effect sizes. The findings suggest that aperiodic EEG parameters may serve as a shared biomarker for metabolic vulnerability of the brain that transcends diagnostic boundaries.