Video-oculographic Examination of Oculomotor Function in Presymptomatic ALS Mutation Carriers

Master's Thesis from the year 2018 in the subject Medicine - Neurology, Psychiatry, Addiction, grade: 1,0, University of Ulm (Klinik für Neurologie), language: English, abstract: This thesis deals with the video-oculographic examination of oculomotor function in presymptomatic ALS mutation carriers. Cognitive deficits are observable in ALS. This study was performed in order to test if this deficit could already be observed in a preclinical phase. Up to this moment putative alterations in a preclinical, presymptomatic phase of ALS-MC are barely studied.

Therefore, this study aimed at investigating preclinical oculomotor performance in asymptomatic ALS mutation carriers.quantitatively detect changes in executive eye movement control in asymptomatic ALS mutation carriers by video-oculographic examination under controlled conditions with healthy age, sex and educational matched healthy unrelated controls.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is the most frequent adult-onset motor neuron disease. As for now, causal therapeutic options are still limited for ALS. The devastating disease is defined as a fast progressive, multisystem degenerative disorder, which is clinically characterized by a predominant loss of motor neurons that disrupts signals to all voluntary innervated muscles. This leads to a progressive weakness of the respective muscles following an almost complete paresis after a couple of years. ALS usually ends in death due to respiratory failure after 30 months on average from disease onset.