Eye movement abnormalities during reading in patients with Alzheimer disease

This goal of this study was to evaluate reading ability by assessing eye movements during reading among patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) compared with normal elderly controls.

Reading is disturbed in patients with AD. These patients may have changes in reading ability early in the course of their disease before clinical alexia or abnormalities are apparent on standard reading tasks.

Reading competence was evaluated by recording eye movements during reading in 14 patients with mild to moderate clinically probable AD and 14 age- and education-matched controls.

All patients with AD could recognize letters and words and could understand written material of similar difficulty. Despite successful reading comprehension among the patients with AD, their oculographs showed slowed reading and irregular eye movements. Compared with controls, the patients with AD did not differ in saccadic duration; however, they had significantly longer fixation times, more forward saccades per line of text, and more saccadic regressions. In addition, increased reading difficulty significantly correlated with a scale of dementia severity in the patients with AD.

This pattern of eye movements corresponds to increased text difficulty and probably represents difficulty with lexical-semantic access in AD. These results suggest that disordered eye movements can signal difficulties in reading ability in AD even before complaints of reading difficulty or abnormalities on reading tests and may be a means of identifying linguistic impairment early in this disorder.