Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 5, 2026
Dynamic Visual Tests to Identify and Quantify Visual Damage and Repair Following Demyelination in Optic Neuritis Patients
Published on: April 14, 2014
Pupillary response to sparse multifocal stimuli in multiple sclerosis patients
E N Ali1, T Maddess2, A C James2
1Eccles Institute of Neuroscience, John Curtin School of Medical Research, Australian National University, Australia eman_c5@yahoo.com.
Objectives:
The objective of this paper is to investigate the pattern of abnormalities and establish the diagnostic power of multifocal objective pupil perimetry (mfPOP) in multiple sclerosis (MS).
Methods:
A prospective study enrolling 35 normal (47.9 ± 16.8 years, 22 females) and 85 MS subjects (49.8 ± 11.3 years, 62 females; 72 relapsing-remitting (RR), and 13 primary or secondary progressives (PorS)). EDSS scores for the RR and PorS groups were 3.53 ± 1.04 (mean ± SD), and 5.9 ± 1.43, respectively. mfPOP responses were obtained from 44 regions/visual field. Each region was analysed according to response time-to-peak and standardised amplitude (AmpStd). Predictive power was measured by percentage area under the receiver operator curve (%AUC).
Results:
mfPOP responses showed a significant reduction of 0.69 ± 0.04 dB (mean ± SE) in AmpStd and significantly delayed time-to-peak of 25.95 ± 0.89 ms (mean ± SE) in MS subjects compared to control subjects (p<0.001). %AUC was greater for time-to-peak than AmpStd both for RR and PorS patients. Diagnostic power followed the EDSS scores but not a history of optic neuritis.
Conclusions:
mfPOP is well tolerated and potentially has a role in the diagnosis and assessment of patients with MS.
