[Reflexive and voluntary saccades in Parkinson's disease].
OBJECTIVE
To evaluate the characteristics of saccadic eye movements in patients with Parkinson's disease(PD).


METHODS
Eye movements of 14 patients with moderate to advanced PD and 12 age-matched controls were recorded with an infrared system. Two kinds of saccade tasks were used: saccade tasks for eliciting reflexive saccades(visually guided saccades in the gap condition) and saccade tasks for eliciting volitional saccades(visually guided saccades, saccades in overlap condition, memory-guided saccades, and anti-saccades). Latency, accuracy, peak velocity, and other parameters of saccades were evaluated.


RESULTS
Visually guided saccades and saccades in the gap condition were slightly hypometric in PD patients. Saccades in the short-term overlap condition were not impaired in PD patients. Increased mean latencies and decreased degrees of accuracy of memory-guided saccades, and increased error rates of the memory-guided saccade task were marked in PD patients. Error rates in the anti-saccade task were not increased in PD but the mean saccadic latencies were slightly increased.


CONCLUSIONS
Reflexive saccades are preserved in PD, whereas memory-guided saccades are markedly impaired. But anti-saccades in a task for eliciting in volitional saccades are not impaired in PD.
Yoshida
Hiroshi
H
Department of Neuro-ophthalmology, Tokyo Metropolitan Neurological Hospital, 2-6-1 Musashidai, Fuchu 183-0042, Japan.
Yamada
Tetsuto
T
Matsuzaki
Hiroe
H
D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012018:Reflex / Q000502:physiology*; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*