Year: 2024
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: Background Many centres distributed throughout the brain are involved in controlling eye movements. Each type of eye movement has its own distinctive motor, sensory, and cognitive properties. Brain damage in any area can result in manifest, quantifiable changes to the dynamics and/or accuracy of one or more types. Eye movements are therefore a potentially valuable biomarker for brain dysfunction. Methods/Techniques HD gene-positive participants and age-matched controls were presented with a range of visual stimuli to assess the quantitative properties (e.g. speed, accuracy, frequency, gain, etc.) of the following eye movement responses: pro- and anti-saccades, self-paced saccades between two static targets, pursuit of a moving target, and the optokinetic response (OKR) to a moving visual field. The stimuli were produced by bespoke software in MATLAB, and eye movements were recorded using an EyeLink 1000 Plus (SR Research). Results/Outcome As previously reported, the main sequences of pro-saccades were not significantly different between the two groups, and the anti-saccade error rate in HD participants was much higher. There was a highly significant reduction in the frequency of self-paced saccades over one minute, which did not appear to be fatigue-related. Finally, HD participants often produced abnormal OKR, and the related perceptual consequences correlated significantly with UHDRS Motor scores. Indeed, this anomaly was apparent even in those with a score of 0. Conclusions Non-invasive recordings of eye movement responses to relatively short stimulus presentations may provide useful biomarkers of abnormalities that precede overt clinical symptoms. Some of these deficits appear to progress with the disease.
Institution: Cardiff University
Language: English
Subfield: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4402374548