Introduction
The visual suppression test reported by Takemori and her colleagues, was already widely known as a test for detecting disturbance of the cerebellar flocculus. Thereafter, this method was also available for detection of central disturbances of the paramedian pontine reticular formation (PPRF) and inferior parietal lobule.
In this report, we adopted this test to examine each disease causing spinocerebellar degeneration, Parkinson disease and Parkinson syndrome.
Subjects
Subjects were 34 patients with spinocerebellar degeneration. The cerebellar type comprised 12 cases, and spinocerebellar type 22 cases. Furthermore we studied 7 cases of Parkinson disease with disturbance of the basal nuclei and 24 cases of Parkinson syndrome.
All cases were in the early or middle stage of the clinical course. We rejected cases that did not show any response to caloric nystagmus, since this was recognized as indicating the progressive stage.
Results
As a result of the visual suppression test, we recognized that there was no enhancement of reaction in LCCA cases and no abnormalities in the visual suppression test in Parkinson disease cases. Some patients with spinocerebellar type degeneration and Parkinson syndrome showed enhanced reaction. Eight PSP patients showed enhanced reaction and their percentages were the highest of all disease groups.
Visual suppression test was considered a useful supplementary diagnostic technique for the differential diagnosis of degenerative disease.
