The effects of music intervention on inhibitory control in patients with frontal lobe epilepsy.

Impaired inhibitory control places a serious burden on the lives and psyches of patients with frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE). Music may serve as an adjunctive therapy to increase inhibitory control function in adults. However, whether music improves inhibitory control function in patients with FLE and its mechanism of action remains to be explored. In this study, 21 FLE patients and 24 healthy controls were recruited to assess the effect of music on inhibitory control in FLE patients by EEG under the Go/NoGo task. The results showed that FLE patients had poor inhibitory control at baseline, and after the music intervention, FLE patients had significantly shorter task reaction time, higher accuracy. Meanwhile, a significant increase in wave amplitude difference between the N2 and P3 components was observed in the mid-frontal region. Also, music affected the connectivity between frontal and temporal lobes in FLE patients. Music may positively affect inhibitory control functions in FLE patients by modulating the amplitudes of N2 and P3 and the functional connectivity of frontal-temporal regions. This proposes a musical intervention to ameliorate cognitive impairment, and contributes to the understanding of the mechanism of action of musical interventions for the treatment of epilepsy with cognitive impairment.