Publications by authors named "Athena Zachou"
Clinical utility of square-wave jerks in neurology and psychiatry.
Front Ophthalmol (Lausanne)
January 2024
Human eye fixation is steadily interrupted by small, physiological or abnormal, eye movements. Square-wave jerks (SWJ) are the most common saccadic intrusion which can be readily seen at the bedside and also quantified using oculographic techniques. Various neurological, neuropsychiatric and psychiatric disorders display abnormal fixational eye movement patterns characterized by frequent SWJ.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- Monocular torsional eye oscillations are a rare type of eye movement disorder, and their cause is not fully understood, as highlighted by a case study.
- The patient had significant issues with torsional oscillopsia in one eye, characterized by spontaneous torsional nystagmus and involuntary soft palate movements.
- Brain MRI showed damage in the left cerebellum and changes in the right inferior olivary nucleus, leading to a discussion about how these findings might explain the unusual eye movements through possible dysfunction of the vestibulo-ocular reflex.
Article Synopsis
- Previous research indicates a connection between malignant melanoma (MM) and Parkinson's disease (PD), suggesting shared molecular mechanisms could underlie this link.
- The study examined the prevalence of MM among 1,416 PD patients, 275 healthy controls, and 670 asymptomatic carriers of PD-related genes, focusing on those with a medical history of MM.
- Findings revealed 46 PD patients with a history of MM, with genetic mutations in the LRRK2 and GBA genes present in some cases, but no correlation was found between these mutations and MM development in symptomatic or asymptomatic individuals.
Aims of the present article are: ) assessing vestibular contribution to spatial navigation, ) exploring how age, global positioning systems (GPS) use, and vestibular navigation contribute to subjective sense of direction (SOD), ) evaluating vestibular navigation in patients with lesions of the vestibular-cerebellum (patients with downbeat nystagmus, DBN) that could inform on the signals carried by vestibulo-cerebellar-cortical pathways. We applied two navigation tasks on a rotating chair in the dark: return-to-start (RTS), where subjects drive the chair back to the origin after discrete angular displacement stimuli (path reversal), and complete-the-circle (CTC) where subjects drive the chair on, all the way round to origin (path completion). We examined 24 normal controls (20-83 yr), five patients with DBN (62-77 yr) and, as proof of principle, two patients with early dementia (84 and 76 yr).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: ITPR1 gene encodes inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate-receptor-type 1, a Ca2+ channel highly expressed in cerebellar Purkinje cells. ITPR1 gene variants, through a loss-of-function mechanism, have been found to be related with the manifestation of spinocerebellar ataxia (SCA) 15, an adult-onset slow progressive cerebellar ataxia, SCA 29, a rare non-progressive congenital cerebellar ataxia and Gillepsie syndrome (SCA 29 phenotype plus aniridia). They share an heterogeneity of additional phenotypic features while no genotype-phenotype correlation has ever been found.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Previous studies in phobic postural vertigo patients showed characteristic frequency changes in body sway fluctuations, raising the question whether similar spectral changes can be also observed in the recently defined syndrome of persistent postural-perceptual dizziness (PPPD).
Study Design: Cross-sectional prospective study.
Setting: Tertiary referral center.