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Abstract Details
Minimal hepatic encephalopathy is associated to alterations in eye movements
Sci Rep. 2022 Oct 7;12(1):16837. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-21230-3.
1Fundación de Investigación Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valencia-INCLIVA, 46010, Valencia, Spain.
2Centre for Automation and Robotics, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
3Servicio de Medicina Digestiva, Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valencia, 46010, Valencia, Spain.
4Servicio de Medicina Digestiva, Hospital Arnau de Vilanova, 46015, Valencia, Spain.
5Bioinformatics and Biostatistics Unit, Centro Investigación Príncipe Felipe, 46012, Valencia, Spain.
6Laboratory of Neurobiology, Centro Investigación Príncipe Felipe, 46012, Valencia, Spain.
7Fundación de Investigación Hospital Clínico Universitario de Valencia-INCLIVA, 46010, Valencia, Spain. carmina.montoliu@uv.es.
8Department of Pathology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Valencia/INCLIVA-Health Research Institute, Avda. Blasco Ibañez, 17, 46010, Valencia, Spain. carmina.montoliu@uv.es.
#Contributed equally.
Abstract
Minimal hepatic encephalopathy (MHE) is diagnosed using PHES battery, but other tests are more sensitive, and a simple tool for early MHE detection is required. Assessment of saccadic eye movements is useful for early detection of cognitive alterations in different pathologies. We characterized the alterations in saccadic eye movements in MHE patients, its relationship with cognitive alterations and its utility for MHE diagnosis. One-hundred and eighteen cirrhotic patients (86 without and 32 with MHE) and 35 controls performed PHES and Stroop test and an eye movements test battery by OSCANN system: visual saccades, antisaccades, memory-guided saccades, fixation test and smooth pursuit. We analyzed 177 parameters of eye movements, assessed their diagnostic capacity for MHE, and correlated with cognitive alterations. MHE patients showed alterations in 56 of the 177 variables of eye movements compared to NMHE patients. MHE patients showed longer latencies and worse performance in most eye movements tests, which correlated with mental processing speed and attention impairments. The best correlations found were for antisaccades and memory-guided saccades, and some parameters in these tests could be useful for discriminating MHE and NMHE patients. Eye movements analysis could be a new, rapid, reliable, objective, and reproducible tool for early diagnose MHE.
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