Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0028738 (nystagmus)
 7,431 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

In this report 2 cases of periodic alternating nystagmus are presented. The most important parameters of this oculomotor disturbance are shown by oculographic tracings. Discussing the literature it is attempted to cast a model of the pathophysiology of PAN.
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PMID:[Periodic alternating nystagmus]. 71 75

Positional nystagmus and body sway were measured for 8 hours following alcohol ingestion in 27 human volunteers. The intensity of positional alcohol nystagmus phase I (PAN-I) correlated well with blood alcohol concentration (BAC) along the time axis; the correlation coefficient between PAN-I and BAC 1 hour after alcohol ingestion was 0.62 (P less than .01). The minimum threshold BAC resulting in PAN-I was 0.23 mg/mL. Body sway was measured by stabilometry. The circumscribed area of posturography before and after alcohol ingestion was compared. Temporal changes in body sway and BAC were also closely correlated. The BAC threshold for increased body sway was estimated to be somewhere between 0.5 and 0.8 mg/mL, considerably higher than the threshold for PAN-I. Measurements of blood acetaldehyde, the dehydrated product of ethanol metabolism, showed no correlation with either the intensity of PAN or changes in body sway. The intensity of PAN and body sway measured at the time of peak BAC 1 hour after alcohol ingestion, however, showed significant positive correlation (r = .50, n = 25; P less than .01).
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PMID:Positional nystagmus and body sway after alcohol ingestion. 228 44

An increased compendium of drugs useful in ocular motor system dysfunction has expanded our capacity to treat selected ocular motility disorders. Adjunctive therapeutic modes (e.g., Fresnel prisms and orthoptic exercises) can also be beneficial. PAN and see-saw nystagmus can be treated with baclofen. Downbeat nystagmus may respond to clonazepam therapy, and prisms may help if the nystagmus can be modified with convergence. Congenital nystagmus may respond minimally to drugs (e.g., baclofen), but prisms or surgical procedures, or both, are still the primary treatment modalities. Innovar may be helpful in patients with severe, incapacitating vestibular disorders, and scopolamine alone or in combination with promethazine may be beneficial in patients with milder ambulatory acute peripheral vestibular disorders. Benign positional vertigo is best treated initially with positional exercises before drug therapy is instituted. Opsoclonus and ocular flutter have been treated successfully with corticosteroids, propranolol, and clonazepam, while microflutter, an extremely rare disorder, can resolve with baclofen. Although therapy with carbamazepine, 5-hydroxtryptophan, and scopolamine has been useful in selected patients with ocular palatal myoclonus, most do not respond to drug treatment. It is not usually necessary to treat voluntary nystagmus, but Fresnel prism lenses should be remembered in refractory patients. Potentially reversible and pseudointernuclear ophthalmoplegias also were discussed. Orthoptic exercises can be beneficial in posttraumatic internuclear ophthalmoplegia. Selected supranuclear palsies can be improved completely with the proper drug regimen. Lastly, superior oblique myokymia can be treated successfully with carbamazepine, with tight surveillance for possible adverse side effects. Descriptive phenomenology and pathophysiological localization must be correlated with brain stem neurochemistry and neuropharmacology to medically treat additional ocular motor system disorders.
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PMID:Medical treatment of nystagmus and ocular motor disorders. 349 76

Besides the positional alcohol nystagmus, PAN I and PAN II, alcohol in conventional doses causes marked side differences in experimental vestibular and oculomotor tests together with qualitative and quantitative alterations of the experimental nystagmus. These toxic, false positive results cannot be distinguished from post-traumatic central and peripheral pathological findings. When writing an expertise, we must therefore prevent a social insurance pension based on alcohol effects, by analysing the concentration of alcohol in the blood.
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PMID:[Modification of vestibular tests by alcohol]. 667 95

The slow compensatory phases of the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) in the rabbit tend to drift and the drift reverses the direction. This periodic alternating drift (PAD) has two peculiar characteristics: (1) it is induced by sinusoidal vestibular stimulation in naive animals, being evoked immediately after stimulus onset and persisting after the end of stimulation; (2) the peak velocity and period of the drift are dependent on stimulus amplitude. PAD of the rabbit has strong similarities with PAN, a periodic alternating nystagmus observed in humans with cerbellar disorders and in monkeys after nodulo-uvulectomy, although its peak velocity is smaller. It is hypothesized that PAD is due to a slight instability, caused by vestibular stimulation in darkness, of the cerebellar adaptive loop, which exerts a variable gain control on the time constant of the velocity storage integrator.
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PMID:Eye instability induced by vestibular stimulation in rabbits. 1143 10