Involuntary saccades and binocular coordination during visual pursuit in Parkinson's disease

Prior studies of oculomotor function in Parkinson's disease (PD) have either focused on saccades while smooth pursuit eye movements were not involved, or tested smooth pursuit without considering the effect of any involuntary saccades. The present study investigated whether these involuntary saccades could serve as a useful biomarker for PD. Ten observers with PD participated in the study along with 10 age-matched normal control (NC) and 10 young control participants (YC). Observers fixated on a central cross while a disk (target) moved toward it from either side of the screen. Once the target reached the fixation cross, observers began to pursue the moving target until the target reached to the other side. To vary the difficulty of fixation and pursuit, the moving target was presented on a blank or a moving background. The moving background consisted of uniformly distributed dots moved in either the same or the opposite direction of the target once the target reached the central fixation cross. To investigate binocular coordination, each background condition was presented under a binocular condition, in which both eyes saw the same stimulus, and under a dichoptic condition, in which one eye saw only the target and the other eye only saw the background. The results showed that in both background conditions, observers with PD made more involuntary saccades than NC and YC during both fixation and pursuit periods while YC and NC showed no difference. Moreover, the difference between left and right eye positions increased over time during the pursuit period for PD group but not for the other two groups. This suggests that individuals with PD may be impaired not only in saccade inhibition, but also in binocular coordination during pursuit. [Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2016.]Accepted manuscrip

Eye movement control during visual pursuit in Parkinson's disease

BACKGROUND: Prior studies of oculomotor function in Parkinson’s disease (PD) have either focused on saccades without considering smooth pursuit, or tested smooth pursuit while excluding saccades. The present study investigated the control of saccadic eye movements during pursuit tasksand assessed the quality of binocular coordinationas potential sensitive markers of PD. METHODS: Observers fixated on a central cross while a target moved toward it. Once the target reached the fixation cross, observers began to pursue the moving target. To further investigate binocular coordination, the moving target was presented on both eyes (binocular condition), or on one eye only (dichoptic condition). RESULTS: The PD group made more saccades than age-matched normal control adults (NC) both during fixation and pursuit. The difference between left and right gaze positions increased over time during the pursuit period for PD but not for NC. The findings were not related to age, as NC and young-adult control group (YC) performed similarly on most of the eye movement measures, and were not correlated with classical measures of PD severity (e.g., Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) score). DISCUSSION: Our results suggest that PD may be associated with impairment not only in saccade inhibition, but also in binocular coordination during pursuit, and these aspects of dysfunction may be useful in PD diagnosis or tracking of disease course.This work was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF SBE-0354378 to Arash Yazdanbakhsh and Bo Cao) and Office of Naval Research (ONR N00014-11-1-0535 to Bo Cao, Chia-Chien Wu, and Arash Yazdanbakhsh). There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. (SBE-0354378 - National Science Foundation (NSF); ONR N00014-11-1-0535 - Office of Naval Research)Published versio