Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie

Research focus

Electrophysiology of sleep and wakefulness; moment-to-moment brain state fluctuations

Research projects

A common basis of our work involves electrophysiological and fMRI studies, mathematical models and statistics, backed by advanced informatics.

Insomnia
One main research focus is to investigate the neurophysiological underpinnings of insomnia, with the research group of Prof. Riemann (sleep medicine). Based upon our studies (Feige et al., 2008) we formulated the REM sleep instability hypothesis of insomnia (Riemann et al., 2012).

Moment-to-moment brain state fluctuations
An important line of basic neurophysiological research with strong clinical relevance examines moment-to-moment regulation of resources. In Feige et al. (2005) we showed the network of areas involved in spontaneous alpha rhythm modulation, including an area of the Thalamus (centromedian nuclei) that is linked to attention. This gains clinical relevance in particular in the field of ADHD, where changes in moment-to-moment attentional regulation are proposed to be the basis for increases in intra-subject variability (ISV) characterizing test performance this disorder. With the research group of Prof. Klein (Department for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Freiburg), we currently examine classical reaction time and electrophysiological markers (Saville et al., 2012).

Paroxysmal EEG activity and psychiatric disorders
In this research with the research group of Prof. Tebartz van Elst, we follow the hypothesis that attentional or emotional dysregulation may be caused by dysfunctional bursts of neuronal activity manifesting in the EEG as IRDAs or IRTAs (irregular delta/theta activity, Tebartz van Elst et al., 2011).

Sleep and learning
With the research group of Prof. Dr. Nissen, we investigate the link between sleep and learning (e.g. Holz et al., 2012).

Addiction
Older electrophysiological work in alcoholism (Olbrich et al., 2002) was followed by sleep (Feige et al., 2007) and fMRI studies (Langosch et al., 2012). The effect of smoking on sleep was examined in Jaehne et al. (2012).

Impulsivity
As part of a large grant from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (01GW0730) we conducted studies using combined EEG, EDA and fMRI in patients with different disorders involving impulse control (e.g. ADHD, Sebastian et al., 2012a) as well as in healthy subjects (Sebastian et al., 2012b).

Selected publications

• Tebartz van Elst, L., Krishnamoorthy, E. S., Schulze-Bonhage, A., Altenmüller, D.-M., Richter, H., Ebert, D., Feige, B., 2011. Local area network inhibition: A model of a potentially important paraepileptic pathomechanism in neuropsychiatric disorders. Epilepsy Behav 22, 231–239.
• Feige, B., Scheffler, K., Esposito, F., Di Salle, F., Hennig, J., Seifritz, E., 2005. Cortical and subcortical correlates of electroencephalographic alpha rhythm modulation. J. Neurophysiol. 93, 2864–2872.
• Feige, B., Scaal, S., Hornyak, M., Gann, H. W., Riemann, D., 2007. Sleep EEG spectral power after withdrawal from alcohol in alcohol dependent patients. Alcohol Clin. Exp. Res. 31, 19–27.
• Feige, B., Al-Shajlawi, A., Nissen, C., Voderholzer, U., Hornyak, M., Spiegelhalder, K., Kloepfer, C., Perlis, M., Riemann, D., 2008. Does REM sleep contribute to subjective wake time in primary insomnia? A comparison of polysomnographic and subjective sleep in 100 patients. J. Sleep Res. 17, 180–190.
• Holz, J., Piosczyk, H., Feige, B., Spiegelhalder, K., Baglioni, C., Riemann, D., Nissen, C., 2012. EEG sigma and slow-wave activity during NREM sleep correlate with overnight declarative and procedural memory consolidation. J. Sleep Res. .
• Jaehne, A., Unbehaun, T., Feige, B., Lutz, U. C., Batra, A., Riemann, D., 2012. How smoking affects sleep: A polysomnographical analysis. Sleep Med. .
• Langosch, J. M., Spiegelhalder, K., Jahnke, K., Feige, B., Regen, W., Kiemen, A., Hennig, J., Olbrich, H. M., 2012. The impact of acamprosate on cue reactivity in alcohol dependent individuals: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study. J. Clin. Psychopharmacol. .
• Olbrich, H. M., Maes, H., Valerius, G., Langosch, J. M., Gann, H., Feige, B., 2002. Assessing cerebral dysfunction with probe-evoked potentials in a CNV task - a study in alcoholics. Clin. Neurophysiol. 113, 815–825.
• Riemann, D., Spiegelhalder, K., Nissen, C., Hirscher, V., Baglioni, C., Feige, B., 2012. REM sleep instability - A new pathway for insomnia? Pharmacopsychiatry 45, 167–176.
• Saville, C. W. N., Shikhare, S., Iyengar, S., Daley, D., Intriligator, J., Boehm, S. G., Feige, B., Klein, C., 2012. Is reaction time variability consistent across sensory modalities? insights from latent variable analysis of single-trial P3b latencies. Biol. Psychol. 91, 275–282.
• Sebastian, A., Gerdes, B., Feige, B., Klöppel, S., Lange, T., Philipsen, A., van Tebartz, E. L., Lieb, K., Tüscher, O., 2012a. Neural correlates of interference inhibition, action withholding and action cancelation in adult ADHD. Psychiatry Res. 202, 132–141.
• Sebastian, A., Pohl, M. F., Klöppel, S., Feige, B., Lange, T., Stahl, C., Voss, A., Klauer, K. C., Lieb, K., Tüscher, O., 2012b. Disentangling common and specific neural subprocesses of response inhibition. NeuroImage .