Saccadic Eye Movements in Elderly Depressed Patients With Suicidal Behaviors: An Exploratory Eye-Tracking Study.

Yoan Barsznica,Eric Laurent,Julia Hickel,Stephane Richard-Devantoy,Julie Monnin,Bérénice Lambert,Cynthia Morgny,Djamila Bennabi,Nicolas Noiret,Emmanuel Haffen,Pierre Vandel,Caroline Masse,Claire De Pinho,Gilles Chopard

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.712347

Abstract

Suicidal behaviors (SBs) are often associated with impaired performance on neuropsychological executive functioning (EF) measures that encourage the development of more specific and reliable tools. Recent evidence could suggest that saccadic movement using eye tracking can provide reliable information on EF in depressive elderly. The aim of this study was to describe oculomotor performances in elderly depressed patients with SB. To achieve this aim, we compared saccadic eye movement (SEM) performances in elderly depressed patients (N = 24) with SB and with no SB in prosaccade (PS) and antisaccade (AS) tasks under the gap, step, and overlap conditions. All participants also underwent a complete neuropsychological battery. Performances were impaired in patients with SB who exhibited less corrected AS errors and longer time to correct them than patients with no SB. Moreover, both groups had a similar performance for PS latencies and correct AS. These preliminary results suggested higher cognitive inflexibility in suicidal patients compared to non-suicidal. This inflexibility may explain the difficulty of the depressed elderly in generating solutions to the resurgence of suicidal ideation (SI) to respond adequately to stressful environments. The assessment of eye movement parameters in depressed elderly patients may be a first step in identifying high-risk patients for suicide.

Highlights

Around one million people die by suicide and ten million people make a suicide attempt (SA) each year worldwide (World Health Organization, 2014)
Saccades were faster in gap condition (M = 237.62, SD = 30.01) than in step (M = 288.45, SD = 35.19, p < 0.001) and overlap conditions (M = 326.62, SD = 50.97, p < 0.001), and they were faster in step than overlap conditions (p < 0.001)
In AS tasks, patients with suicidal behavior (SB) and no SB had a similar proportion of correct AS, patients with SB had fewer corrected AS errors and they took more time to correct them than patients with no SB

Summary

Introduction

Around one million people die by suicide and ten million people make a suicide attempt (SA) each year worldwide (World Health Organization, 2014). Agerelated suicide vulnerability associated with depression requires great vigilance (Bazin, 2004) and emphasizes the need to identify high-risk patients. Age-related suicide vulnerability could be explained by cognitive and emotional inability to respond adequately to stressful environmental factors (Richard-Devantoy et al, 2012). Depressed patients with a history of SA or suicidal ideation (SI) are found to have poorer executive performance than nonsuicidal depressed and healthy elderly especially on tasks that rely on inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility (King et al, 2000; Marzuk et al, 2005; Westheide et al, 2008; Mcgirr et al, 2012; Richard-Devantoy et al, 2012, 2015, 2016)

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