Correlates between neurological soft signs and saccadic parameters in schizophrenia.

Objective: Neurological Soft Signs (NSS) and impairments in oculomotor saccadic paradigms are both frequent in patients with schizophrenia but their correlation has never been explored.

Methods: 78 patients with DSM-IV schizophrenia (including 43 non-treated) and 41 matched healthy controls were tested for NSS, and on three saccadic tasks: prosaccades, predictive saccades and memory-guided saccades) using infrared oculometry. We analyzed correlations between NSS scores and latencies in all three tasks, rate of errors in memory-guided saccades, and rate of anticipated predictive saccades.