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Frontal cortical dysfunction in Parkinson's disease (PD): Comparison of memory-based smooth-pursuit and anti-saccade tasks, and neuropsychological and motor symptom evaluations.

We reported recently that during a memory-based smooth-pursuit task, most Parkinson's disease (PD) patients exhibited normal cue-information memory but impaired smooth-pursuit preparation and execution. A minority of PD patients had abnormal cue-information memory or difficulty in understanding the task. To further examine differences between these two groups, we assigned an anti-saccade task and compared correct rates with various neuropsychological and motor symptom evaluations. The anti-saccade task requires voluntary saccades in the opposite direction to a visual stimulus, and patients with frontal cortical impairments are known to exhibit reflexive saccades (errors). We classified PD patients into 2 groups: one with normal cue-information memory during memory-based smooth-pursuit (n = 14), and the other with abnormal cue-information memory or with difficulty in understanding the memory task (n = 6). The two groups had significantly different anti-saccade correct rates and frontal assessment battery (FAB) scores (P < 0.01). Anti-saccade correct rates of individual patients (n = 20) correlated significantly with FAB scores (P < 0.01) but not with age, Hoehn-Yahr stage, unified PD rating scale (UPDRS) part III or mini-mental state examination (MMSE) scores. Among FAB subtests, significant correlation was obtained only with motor programming scores. These results suggest that performance of memory-based smooth-pursuit and/or anti-saccades depend on frontal cortical function or dysfunction.