Abstract
There is much evidence pointing out eye movement alterations in several neurological diseases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first video-oculography study describing potential alterations of eye movements in the post-COVID-19 condition. Visually guided saccades, memory-guided saccades, and antisaccades in horizontal axis were measured. In all visual tests, the stimulus was deployed with a gap condition. The duration of the test was between 5 and 7 min per participant. A group of patients with the post-COVID-19 condition was included in this study. Values were compared with a group () of healthy volunteers whom the SARS-CoV-2 virus had not infected. Features such as centripetal and centrifugal latencies, success rates in memory saccades, antisaccades, and blinks were computed. We found that patients with the post-COVID-19 condition had eye movement alterations mainly in centripetal latency in visually guided saccades, the success rate in memory-guided saccade test, latency in antisaccades, and its standard deviation, which suggests the involvement of frontoparietal networks. Further work is required to understand these eye movements’ alterations and their functional consequences.
Highlights
The measurement of eye movement and its alteration arises as a powerful marker to diagnose brain functionality
By computing the absolute error in each measurement, we found that this error ranged between 8 × 10−2 and 6 × 10−3 ms; the values measured with the portable gaze tracker had the accuracy needed to compute latency
The values measured reveal that patients who have suffered COVID-19 have eye movement alterations of interest, as these alterations are similar to those reported for mild cognitive impairment or Alzheimer’s disease [3,4,5,6,7,9,11,12,15,16]
Summary
The measurement of eye movement and its alteration arises as a powerful marker to diagnose brain functionality. Patients with AD have higher latency and latency variability regardless of the tasks, and show more incorrect antisaccades and take more time to correct them, which has been suggested as an early marker of AD [3,4,5,6,7]. In PD and some other parkinsonian syndromes, patients may present eye movement alterations, such as hypometria, abnormally fragmented saccades (multistep or staircase saccades), and considerable difficulty in inhibiting the saccade movement reflex during the antisaccade test. In patients with moderate or advanced PD, the latency in the visually guided saccades are higher compared with the controls [1,9]
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