Saccade test results may help inform rehabilitation for sports-related concussion
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Key takeaways:
- Older age was associated with fewer fixations on horizontal and vertical saccade tests.
- Male sex was associated with more fixations on horizontal and vertical saccade tests.
Patients with concussion who underwent testing with eye-tracking technology had lower saccade performance, supporting the use of these tests to help guide rehabilitation for concussion, according to research in Optometry and Vision Science.
“Sport-related concussions, in particular, have created controversy due to the reported association with late cognitive decline, second impact syndrome and chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” Ailin Song, MD, MHSc, from Duke University School of Medicine, and colleagues wrote. “To make matters more complicated, the detection of sport-related concussion and [traumatic brain injury] is difficult as symptoms can be transient and subtle, and visual-motor performance is critically important in sports as seen in numerous studies.”
The researchers conducted a retrospective study of 115 patients with concussion history, primarily from sports-related injury, who underwent oculomotor testing using RightEye eye-tracking technology at Duke Eye Center from June 30, 2017, to Jan. 10, 2022.
Song and colleagues compared concussion patients with age-matched normative population data derived from healthy individuals and found that those with a history of concussion on average had fewer fixations on self-paced horizontal and vertical saccade tests as well as lower horizontal and vertical saccade speed/accuracy ratios.
Among patients with concussion history, older age was associated with fewer fixations on horizontal and vertical saccade tests, and male sex was associated with more fixations on horizontal and vertical saccade tests. Older age also was associated with lower horizontal saccade speed/accuracy ratio after adjusting for sex, number of concussions and time between concussion and oculomotor testing.
“These findings support the use of saccade test results as biomarkers for concussion and have implications for post-concussion rehabilitation strategies,” Song and colleagues wrote. “Future research could explore how the oculomotor performance changes over time, which may aid in ‘return-to-play’ decision-making for patients with sport-related concussion history.”
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