Evidence of a pharmacodynamic EEG profile in rats following clonidine administration using a nonlinear analysis

BACKGROUND: Changes caused by clonidine in rodent electroencephalograms (EEG) have been reported with some inconsistency. For this reason, a pre-clinical study was conducted in order to confirm previous findings with both a standard spectral analysis and a sleep stage scoring procedure. In addition, a nonlinear technique for analysing the time-varying signals was implemented to compare its performance against conventional approaches. RESULTS: The nonlinear method succeeds in quantifying all dose-related responses from the data set relying solely on the EEG trace. CONCLUSIONS: Nonlinear approaches can deliver a suitable alternative to the sleep-stage scoring methods commonly used for drug effect detection.