This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Citing articles on Web of Science (13)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Neurology, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Imaging Correlates

Gilbert Wunderlich, MD; Boris Suchan, PhD; Jens Volkmann, MD; Hans Herzog, PhD; Volker Hömberg, MD; Rüdiger J. Seitz, MD

Arch Neurol. 2000;57:561-565.

Objective  To investigate the cerebral metabolic and functional patterns during recovery from cortical blindness.

Design  Follow-up study with serial clinical, metabolic, and functional imaging and visual evoked potentials.

Case Presentation  A 24-year-old woman suffered from cortical blindness after cardiac arrest and recovered over a 6-month period. During recovery, she experienced complex visual hallucinations that could be initiated by visual imagery.

Results  Initially, the regional cerebral metabolic rate of glucose was severely reduced in the visual and parieto-occipital cortex bilaterally but recovered almost completely. Visual hallucinations led to significant increases of the regional cerebral blood flow in the initially severely hypometabolic parieto-occipital and temporolateral cortex.

Conclusions  Recovery of vision was related to normalization of the postlesionally dysfunctional cortex. Visual hallucinations appeared as the clinical correlate of the electrophysiological hyperexcitability of the recovering partially damaged visual cortex.

From the Neurologische Klinik, Heinrich-Heine-Universität (Drs Wunderlich, Volkmann, and Seitz), and the Neurologisches Therapiecentrum (Drs Suchan and Hömberg), Düsseldorf, and the Institut für Medizin, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Jülich (Drs Wunderlich and Herzog), Germany.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLE

Archives of Neurology Reader's Choice: Continuing Medical Education
Arch Neurol. 2000;57(4):613-614.
FULL TEXT  

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

Charles Bonnet Syndrome After Occipital Cortical Resection for Cortical Dysplasia May Be Related to Denervation Supersensitivity--Reply
Choi and Lee
Arch Neurol 2005;62:1479-1480.
FULL TEXT  

Steroid-Responsive Charles Bonnet Syndrome in Temporal Arteritis
Razavi et al.
J. Neuropsychiatry Clin. Neurosi. 2004;16:505-508.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT