It was a quiet Thursday afternoon when AS, a 68-year-old woman from a suburb of Chicago, awakened from a nap to the realization that something was terribly wrong.

When AS woke from her nap, she couldn’t find where doors or cabinets were. She couldn’t name or distinguish familiar household objects. She couldn’t read a book or the numbers on her telephone. She couldn’t see where the bedroom wall ended and the door began. Yet when she saw an ophthalmologist, her vision with glasses was 20/20. She and her husband left the ophthalmologist’s office with a referral to see a neurologist, and “wondering what sort of ailment could rob her of her ability to see the bathroom sink, while leaving her with what we typically think of as perfect vision.”

Balint’s syndrome is named after Austro-Hungarian neurologist Rezső Bálint, who first described it. The condition is caused by one or more strokes in certain regions of the brain. It causes three deficits: Difficulty initiating voluntary eye movements (such as following a physician’s finger); inaccurate arm pointing (a patient can see an object, but is unable to pick it up); and constriction of the visual field (ask a patient to look at a parking lot, and all she sees is a lamp post or a car.)

A Loyola University Medical Center paper “is an attempt to inform both our clinical and subjective understandings of Balint’s syndrome through narratives of two patients suffering from this rare and unique neurological disorder.”

Researchers use characteristic differences in eye movements to identify patients with deficits in neurological function.

Observing patients’ eye movements may hold clues about neurological functioning. In a study published last month (August 25) in the Journal of Neurology, scientists show that subtle differences in eye movement patterns can be utilized to identify patients with Parkinson’s, fetal alcohol syndrome, or attention deficit disorder, providing hope for a quick and noninvasive strategy to aid in diagnosing these, and possibly other, neurological diseases.

“I am very impressed with the use of this eye tracking as a potential behavioral biomarker,” said Edward Riley, who studies fetal alcohol syndrome at San Diego State University, but did not participate in the research. The strategy could one day be used to rapidly screen children at risk for behavioral problems, he added, but whose mild symptoms may cause their issues to be overlooked.

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Scientists on the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have designed a compound that shows promise as a potential therapy for one of the diseases closely linked to fragile X syndrome, a genetic condition that causes mental retardation, infertility, and memory impairment, and is the only known single-gene cause of autism.

The study, published online ahead of print in the journal ACS Chemical Biology September 4, 2012, focuses on tremor ataxia syndrome, which usually affects men over the age of 50 and results in Parkinson’s like-symptoms—trembling, balance problems, muscle rigidity, as well as some neurological difficulties, including short-term memory loss and severe mood swings.

Sheep backpacks reveal flocking strategy

UK researchers have shown for the first time that instead of fleeing randomly when faced with danger, sheep head straight for the center of the flock.

Understanding this behavior in healthy animals may help researchers understand the breakdown in social behaviours caused by neurological disorders in sheep, as well as those in humans, such as Huntington’s disease.

The findings support a 40-year-old idea put forward by evolutionary biologist Bill Hamilton. He suggested that creatures as different as insects, fish and cattle all react to danger by moving towards the middle of their respective swarms, schools or herds. “Scientists agree that flocking behavior has evolved in response to the risk of being attacked by predators.

The idea is that being part of a tight-knit group not only increases the chances that you might spot a predator, but decreases the chance that you are the one the predator goes for when it attacks,” explains Dr. Andrew King from The Royal Veterinary College (RVC), lead author the study, published in Current Biology today.