Quantitative Perimetry in Optic Subatrophy from Previous Optical Neuritis in Multiple Sclerosis

Abstract

The present report deals with patients suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS) with and without optic neuritis. We tested central visual function (visual acuity, colour discrimination, cortical evoked potential), peripheral vision (isopter and profile perimetry) as well as ocular motility (fusional amplitude).

The attack of neuritis is found to deteriorate both central and peripheral vision. Significant differences are found between the affected eye and the contralateral non-affected eye. The time elapsed after the detection of MS seems to be responsible for some contradictory effects: a slight improvement of central visual acuity and on the other hand a deterioration of the Perimetric profile even in the contralateral eye without episodes of neuritis.

At last a dot-gram is suggested, to give an idea of the overall level of deterioration of visual function, in every patient: here the responses to various tests are weighted according to four step scales.

We tested a sample of 41 patients (ranging in age from 17 to 37 years), suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS). In the history of 21 of these patients, an attack of optic neuritis (ON) was recorded. This was not the case for the other 20 ones. We are mainly interested in the after-effects of the attacks of neuritis. For this, in addition to qualitative reports about the aspects of the optic disc, we gathered quantitative data about functional impairments concerning both central vision (visual acuity, colour discrimination, pattern evoked potential) and peripheral vision (both isopter and profile perimetry).