title: Frontal cortical dysfunction in Parkinson's disease (PD): Comparison of memory-based smooth-pursuit and anti-saccade tasks, and neuropsychological and motor symptom evaluations.
abstract: We reported recently that during a memory-based smooth-pursuit task, most Parkinson's disease (PD) patients exhibited normal cue-information memory but impaired smooth-pursuit preparation and execution. A minority of PD patients had abnormal cue-information memory or difficulty in understanding the task. To further examine differences between these two groups, we assigned an anti-saccade task and compared correct rates with various neuropsychological and motor symptom evaluations. The anti-saccade task requires voluntary saccades in the opposite direction to a visual stimulus, and patients with frontal cortical impairments are known to exhibit reflexive saccades (errors). We classified PD patients into 2 groups: one with normal cue-information memory during memory-based smooth-pursuit (n = 14), and the other with abnormal cue-information memory or with difficulty in understanding the memory task (n = 6). The two groups had significantly different anti-saccade correct rates and frontal assessment battery (FAB) scores (P < 0.01). Anti-saccade correct rates of individual patients (n = 20) correlated significantly with FAB scores (P < 0.01) but not with age, Hoehn-Yahr stage, unified PD rating scale (UPDRS) part III or mini-mental state examination (MMSE) scores. Among FAB subtests, significant correlation was obtained only with motor programming scores. These results suggest that performance of memory-based smooth-pursuit and/or anti-saccades depend on frontal cortical function or dysfunction.
authors: Department of Neurology, Sapporo Yamanoue Hospital.
authors: Norie
authors: N
authors: Ito
authors: Hidetoshi
authors: H
authors: Takei
authors: Susumu
authors: S
authors: Chiba
authors: Kikuro
authors: K
authors: Fukushima
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D003463:Cues; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D005625:Frontal Lobe / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D009043:Motor Activity / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010300:Parkinson Disease / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000523:psychology*; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology*