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Differential eye movement features between Alzheimer’s disease patients with and without depressive symptoms

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Abstract

Background

Accurately diagnosing depressive symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) patients is often challenging. Eye movement parameters have been demonstrated as biomarkers for assessing cognition and psychological conditions.

Aim

To investigate the differences in eye movement between AD patients with and without depressive symptoms.

Methods

Eye movement data of 65 AD patients were compared between the depressed AD (D-AD) and non-depressed AD (nD-AD) groups. Logistic regression analysis was employed to identify diagnostic biomarkers and the ROC curve was plotted. The correlation between eye movement and HAMD-17 scores was assessed by partial correlation analysis.

Results

The D-AD patients showed longer saccade latency and faster average/peak saccade velocities in the overlap prosaccade test, longer average reaction time and faster average saccade velocity in the gap prosaccade test, longer start-up durations, slower pursuit velocity, more offsets, and larger total offset degrees in the smooth pursuit test, and poorer fixation stability in both the central and lateral fixation tests compared to nD-AD patients. The start-up duration in the smooth pursuit test and the number of offsets in the central fixation test were identified as the diagnostic eye movement parameters for D-AD patients with the area under the ROC curves of 0.8011. Partial correlation analysis revealed that the start-up duration and pursuit velocity in the smooth pursuit test and the total offset degrees in the lateral fixation test were correlated with HAMD-17 scores in D-AD patients.

Discussion and conclusions

Eye movement differences may help to differentiate D-AD patients from nD-AD patients in a non-invasive and cost-effective manner.

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the participants in the study and the staff involved.

Funding

This work was supported by Application of Clinical Technology in Elderly Health Research Project in Jiangsu Province (LD2021031); Suzhou Science and Technology Plan Medical and Health Care Science and Technology Innovation Applied Basic Research (SKY2022161); Research Project of Neurological Diseases in the Second Affiliated Hospital of Suzhou University, Research Center (ND2023A01); Jiangsu Provincial Medical Key Discipline for the 14th Five-Year Plan (ZDXK202217).

Author information

Author notes

  1. Xiaofen Weng and Shanwen Liu have contributed equally to this work and shared the first authorship.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Neurology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, 1055 San Xiang Road, Suzhou, 215004, Jiangsu, China

    Xiaofen Weng, Shanwen Liu, Chunfeng Liu & Hua Hu

  2. Department of Geriatric Medicine, The Affiliated Suzhou Hospital of Nanjing Medical University, Suzhou Municipal Hospital, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China

    Xiaofen Weng

  3. Department of Radiology, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China

    Meng Li & Jiangtao Zhu

  4. Department of Ultrasonography, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China

    Yingchun Zhang

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  1. Xiaofen Weng
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Contributions

Study concept and design: HH, JZ, XW. Acquisition of data: SL, ML. Analysis and interpretation of data: XW, SL, YZ, YZ. Drafting of the manuscript: XW. Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: HH, CL, JZ. XW: conceptualization, software, formal analysis, visualization, writing—original draft. SL: investigation, formal analysis, data curation, validation. ML: software, data curation, validation. YZ: investigation, formal analysis, methodology. JZ: software, supervision, formal analysis, validation, methodology. CL: writing—review and editing. HH: writing—review and editing, conceptualization, supervision, project administration.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hua Hu.

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The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

This study was approved by the ethics committee of the Second Affiliated Hospital of Soochow University (JD-LK-2021-049-01).

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AD patients and their families signed informed consent forms.

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Weng, X., Liu, S., Li, M. et al. Differential eye movement features between Alzheimer’s disease patients with and without depressive symptoms. Aging Clin Exp Res 35, 2987–2996 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-023-02595-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-023-02595-5

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