You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
PostScript
Letter
Apraxia of lid opening due to a small lesion in basal ganglia: two case reports
  1. Masaki Hirose1,2,
  2. Hitoshi Mochizuki1,
  3. Mari Honma3,
  4. Toru Kobayashi4,
  5. Masatoyo Nishizawa2,
  6. Yoshikazu Ugawa1
  1. 1Department of Neurology, Fukushima Medical University, Fukushima, Japan
  2. 2Department of Neurology in Brain Research Institute, Niigata University, Niigata, Japan
  3. 3Department of Neurology, Masu Memorial Hospital, Fukushima, Japan
  4. 4Department of Neurosurgery, Hoshi General Hospital, Fukushima, Japan
  1. Correspondence to Dr Masaki Hirose, Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, Fukushima Medical University, 1 Hikarigaoka, Fukushima 960-1295, Japan; masakihirose1977{at}yahoo.co.jp

https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.2009.184846

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    The apraxia of lid opening (ALO), a synonym for apraxia of eye opening, is a disabling syndrome characterised by an inability to open the eyes at will, and patients sometimes try to open their eyes by contracting the frontalis muscles and touching their eye lids with their own fingers (sensory trick). This symptom is often associated with blepharospasm and/or ptosis and sometimes seen in patients with Parkinson's disease or other movement disorders. These reports suggest that ALO may be produced by some lesions at the basal ganglia.

    To determine specific sites responsible for some symptoms, patients with the target symptoms resulting from a small cerebrovascular lesion usually can provide us with useful information. However, the ALO is rarely produced by a single cerebrovascular lesion.1 A few patients with ALO had a large ischaemic lesion at the non-dominant side in the middle cerebral artery territory.1 One case report described a small lesion at the putamen causing ALO.2 Here, we present two patients with ALO due to a small lesion in the basal ganglia and discuss mechanisms for ALO.

    Patient 1: a 60-year-old woman

    On 10 December 2008, patient 1 developed right hemiparesis and had difficulty in opening her eyes. A brain CT showed …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests None.

    • Patient consent Obtained.

    • Ethics approval Ethics approval was provided by the Fukushima Medical University.

    • Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.