Introduction:
Visual abnormalities and manual motor control have been studied extensively after stroke, but an understanding of oculomotor control post-stroke has not.
Recent studies have revealed that in visually guided reaches arm movements are planned during eye movement execution, which may contribute to increased task complexity. In fact, in healthy controls during visually guided reaches, the onset of eye movement is delayed, its velocity reduced, and endpoint errors are larger relative to isolated eye movements.
Our objective in this experiment was to examine the temporal properties of eye movement execution for stroke patients with no diagnosed visual impairment. The goal is to improve understanding of oculomotor control in stroke relative to normal function, and ultimately further understand its coordination with manual motor control during joint eye and hand movements.
We hypothesized that stroke patients would show abnormal initiation or onset latency for saccades made in an eye movement task, as compared to healthy controls.
Methods:
We measured the kinematics of eye movements during point-to-point saccades; there was an initial static, fixation point and the stimulus was a flashed target on a computer monitor. We used a video-based eye tracker for objective recording of the eye at a sampling frequency of 2000 Hz (SR Research, Eyelink). 10 stroke subjects, over 4 months from injury and with no diagnosed visual impairment, and 10 healthy controls completed 432 saccades in a serial fashion.
Results:
Stroke patients had significantly faster onset latencies as compared to healthy controls during saccades (99.5ms vs. 245.2ms, p=0.00058).
Conclusion:
A better understanding of the variations in oculomotor control post-stroke, which may go unnoticed during clinical assessment, may improve understanding of how eye control synchronizes with arm or manual motor control. This knowledge could assist in tailoring rehabilitative strategies to amplify motor recovery. For next steps, we will perform objective eye and hand recordings during visually guided reaches post-stroke to better understand the harmonization or lack thereof after neurologic insult.
The neural selection and control of saccades by the frontal eye field