Antisaccadic Eye Movements Are Correlated with Corpus Callosum White Matter Mean Diffusivity, Stroop Performance, and Symptom Burden in Mild Traumatic Brain Injury and Concussion

Abstract

Antisaccades are thought to involve higher level inputs from neural centers involved in rapid eye movement inhibition and control. Previous work has demonstrated that performance on the antisaccade task can help in the assessment of injury in acute and/or chronic mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). In this exploratory study, we performed cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons of rapid eye movement, followed by correlations of antisaccade performance with assessments of symptom burden, diffusion tensor imaging, and a neuropsychological test of response inhibition. Significant deficits in antisaccade median latency, F(2, 31) = 3.65, p = 0.04 and prosaccade error mean duration, F(2, 31) = 3.63, p = 0.04 were found between patient groups and controls: the former was correlated with loss of white matter integrity in the splenium of the corpus callosum in acute mTBI, rho = 0.90, p = 0.0005. Furthermore, increased antisaccade median latency was also correlated with poor performance on an executive functioning task, r2 = 0.439, p = 0.03, and greater symptom burden, r2 = 0.480, p = 0.02 in the acute mTBI patients. Our preliminary research suggests that the antisaccade task could be useful as a neurological marker for mTBI and concussion, but more work is required.

Peer Review #1 of "Relationships between neuropsychological and antisaccade measures in multiple sclerosis patients (v0.1)"

“…AS performance was worse in patients with MS than in controls. These results are in line with other studies investigating AS in MS (Fielding et al 2012;Fielding et al 2009;Kolbe et al 2014 ) and other neurological diseases (Crawford et al 2005;Peltsch et al 2008;Ting et al 2015). We noticed that the number of directional errors in our control group was higher than the values reported by Fielding that reported only about 10% (Fielding et al 2009).…”

“…In line with our hypotheses AS and Stroop performances were impaired and correlated. These findings are in agreement with other studies and are particularly relevant because the disease in our group of patients was at early stagesmedian EDSS 1.5 in a 0-10 scale, see Table 1 ( Kolbe et al 2014;Ting et al 2015). The AS task remains a research tool because measuring and analysing eye movements requires specialized equipment and training that still note available to use in clinics.…”

“…To our knowledge, our study is the first to show the association between Stroop and AS tasks in patients with MS. Although, there is a recent study by Ting showing a equivalent association in patients with mild traumatic brain injury and concussion (Ting et al 2015).…”

“…Manuscript to be reviewed However, some studies mention lesions in other areas of the brain associated with reduced AS performance (Kolbe et al 2014;Ting et al 2015) Differences between groups for prosaccades and corrective saccades latency and peakvelocities (for all types of saccades) were not statistically significant. Our interpretation of a lack of statistically significant differences for the latency is that -the generation of reflexive prosaccades and corrective saccades was not compromised in our MS participants.…”

Development and validation of a high-speed video system for measuring saccadic eye movement

“…The behavioral Bcosts^o f antisaccades have been linked to the top-down and executive demands of inhibiting a prepotent prosaccade and the spatial transformation of the stimulus' coordinates. Accordingly, pro-and antisaccades provide a tool for examining how executive and nonexecutive demands influence oculomotor control in healthy individuals as well as in individuals with neurological disorders, including concussion (Ettenhofer & Barry, 2016;Hoffer et al, 2017;Ting, Schweizer, Topolovec-Vranic, & Cusimano, 2015;Ventura, Balcer, Galetta, & Rucker, 2016).…”