title: [Disturbance in voluntary control of saccadic eye movements in disorders of social brain].
abstract: Disorders of the social brain include Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), schizophrenia (SZ) and schizoid- and schizotypal-personality disorders. ASD is one of the developmental disorders with brain dysfunction, but the pathophysiology has not been clarified. In contrast, recent studies suggest that schizophrenia patients have pathologic findings mainly in the frontal and temporal cortices. The frontal eye movement related areas are involved in voluntary control of saccadic eye movements such as anti-saccades. We examined voluntary control of saccadic eye movements in 13 adult subjects aged 20-35 with ASD and compared the results with the performances of 13 controls. In the anti-saccade task, ASD subjects showed error rates of 37.3 +/- 27.6 (mean +/- SD)%, significantly higher than controls (13.8 +/- 14.1%), although only 5 ASD subjects showed error rates higher than mean + 2SD of the controls. It has been shown that schizophrenia patients showed abnormalities in the antisaccade task including higher error rate and longer latencies. In our study about 70% of 99 schizophrenia patients showed abnormalities in the anti-saccade task. Difficulties in inhibiting reflexive saccades and initiating saccades without target based on working memory suggest dysfunction of the frontal eye movement areas such as the frontal eye field, supplementary eye field and prefrontal cortex. Although the number of ASD subjects examined was relatively small, the percentage of subjects who showed significantly higher error rates (mean 37.3%) was less compared to those of schizophrenics (mean 70%), suggesting less involvement of the frontal eye movement related areas in the ASD.
authors.affiliation: Department of Rehabilitation Science, Faculty of Health Sciences, Hokkaido University.
authors.forename: Junko
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fukushima
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002659:Child Development Disorders, Pervasive / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000503:physiopathology