Rinsho Shinkeigaku (Clinical Neurology)

Original Article

Frontal cortical dysfunction in Parkinson's disease (PD): Comparison of memory-based smooth-pursuit and anti-saccade tasks, and neuropsychological and motor symptom evaluations

Norie Ito, M.D.1)4), Hidetoshi Takei, M.D.2), Susumu Chiba, M.D.1)4) and Kikuro Fukushima, M.D.3)

1)Department of Neurology, Sapporo Yamanoue Hospital
2)Department of Radiology, Sapporo Yamanoue Hospital
3)Clinical Brain Research Laboratory, Sapporo Yamanoue Hospital
4)Present address: Department of Neuromedical Center, Sapporo Nishimaruyama Hospital

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.
Full Text of this Article in Japanese PDF (391K)

(CLINICA NEUROL, 56: 747|753, 2016)
key words: Parkinson's disease, memory-based smooth-pursuit, anti-saccade, neuropsychological/motor symptom evaluations, motor programming

(Received: 11-Jul-16)