Saccadic paradigms display changes across a number of degenerative conditions reflecting changes in the oculomotor pathway which in some conditions have been linked to disease presentation.
Objective:
To examine a novel range of saccadic paradigms in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD).
Methods:
Prosaccade, predictive, self-paced, memory-guided, and anti-saccade tasks were examined in bvFTD patients and controls.
Results:
A significant increase in latency for the bvFTD group was seen in all tasks. Self-paced saccades are reduced in number, memory-guided saccades display an increase in errors. Predictive saccades show an increased latency that does not remain when prosaccade latency changes are accounted for. While changes were seen across a range of paradigms, no individual task completely separated bvFTD from control participants.
Conclusion:
bvFTD patients as a group display a number of changes on saccadic testing which may reflect the frontal lobe changes seen in this condition.
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