Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia performance on a range of saccadic tasks

Abstract

Background: 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 p..