Eye movement dysfunction in dementia of the Alzheimer type.

Patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) are described to have disturbances in basic visual, complex visual and oculomotor functions. In order to study and quantify dysfunction of eye movements under several paradigms, they were measured with infrared photoelectric techniques and analyzed by a digital computer. The study included 12 normal subjects and 10 patients with mild to moderate DAT (DSM-III-R criteria). The authors' results could demonstrate both an attentional deficit to externally triggered, unpredictable targets and an impaired systematic, voluntary, internally organized scanning of the environment due to motivational and perceptional deficits.