A Case of Pure Autotopagnosia and Dressing Disorder following Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease

Abstract

  We studied a patient, N.A., who showed pure autotopagnosia and dressing disorder following Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In our previous report, we had administered tests to examine N.A.ʼs ability to localize his own or otherʼs body parts. He had shown selective inability to localize his own body parts, and we had concluded that his pure autotopagnosia owed to impairment of recognition of the spatial position of his body parts in the egocentric reference frame. In this report, we probed an effective examination method for clarifying autotopagnosia considering reported cases, because a comprehensive test battery for autotopagnosia has not yet been established.
  We also studied the dressing disability in N.A. and in a control patient, Y.O., who showed dressing disorder without pure autotopagnosia. The dressing disorder demonstrated by N.A. in terms of jacket folding, putting arms into jacket sleeves, and taking off a jacket were likely related to dysfunctions in recognizing the form and size of clothes as they corresponded to his body. Y.O. showed impaired mental rotation, which produced errors in recognizing the directions of a jacket when he put it on. We concluded that N.A. showed dysfunctions in body form and size representation which resulted in dressing disorder and pure autotopagnosia. These results suggest that a new examination method needs to be created to clarify disorders of body form and size representation.