CHANGES IN SACCADIC EYE MOVEMENTS PRODUCED BY NOVEL BRAIN AND VESTIBULAR REHABILITATION THERAPY

摘要

Saccadic eye movements offer several insights into the functional status of many areas of the central nervous system. As such their observation is an important component of any neurological assessment. Unfortunately, these types of eye movements are very fast and therefore cannot be evaluated in detail without high speed instrumentation. Direct infrared (IR) technology allows to easily quantify standard saccades parameters such as latency, peak and mean velocity, and Q factor, as well as to record the actual shape of the movement and its velocity. Using a direct IR device, we investigated if it is possible to change saccades using a novel brain and vestibular rehabilitation therapy in subjects suffering a variety of neurological dysfunctions. Pre-post therapy comparison of saccade parameters showed that this type of subject's specific therapy can improve with statistical significance the parameters of interest. However, the effects were not limited to the parameters of interest: subject-specific brain and vestibular rehabilitation therapy can improve the other parameters as well, although this improvement was not always statistically significant. Furthermore, we found that for the infrequent cases where the subject-specific brain and vestibular rehabilitation therapy produced a deterioration of the other parameters, it was not statistically significant.