Frecuencia alfa pico según niveles de severidad en dolor neuropático y acúfeno: un análisis secundario exploratorio

Aim: This study examined whether peak alpha frequency (PAF) differs across clinical severity levels in neuropathic pain and tinnitus and compared two established PAF estimation methods. Design and methods: A secondary analysis was conducted using public resting-state EEG datasets from 36 patients with neuropathic pain and 36 patients with tinnitus. Severity was classified using the Brief Pain Inventory and Tinnitus Handicap Inventory, respectively. One-minute eyes-closed EEG segments were preprocessed, and PAF was estimated at 16 shared electrodes and as a grand average using peak picking and center of gravity. Kruskal–Wallis tests were performed separately for each condition, and Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate correction was applied across 34 comparisons per condition. Results: No channel-level or grand-average comparison remained statistically significant after correction for multiple comparisons. In the neuropathic pain group, peak picking produced a nominal unadjusted difference at T7 (p = 0.0169), which did not survive correction (q = 0.5746). No significant findings were identified in the tinnitus group. Limitations and implications: Interpretation is limited by the fixed and modest sample sizes, potentially imbalanced severity subgroups, absence of healthy controls, use of one-minute EEG segments, clinical and acquisition heterogeneity, different EEG reference configurations, and lack of prospective validation. Original contribution: Rather than proposing a new PAF estimator, this study provides a harmonized comparison of peak picking and center of gravity across two public clinical EEG datasets and evaluates the robustness of severity-related findings after multiplicity correction. Conclusions: The results do not provide robust evidence that PAF alone differentiates severity levels in neuropathic pain or tinnitus. The nominal T7 observation should be considered hypothesis-generating and requires independent validation.