Eye movement performance and clinical outcomes among female athletes post-concussion.
Virginia Gallagher, Brian Vesci, Jeffrey Mjaanes and 4 others
PMID 33103479WHAT IT FOUND
Female athletes with recent concussion made more errors on a task requiring them to look away from a target than healthy controls.
However, eye movement measures did not reliably predict how long symptoms lasted or when athletes returned to play.
Key findings
01Concussed athletes committed significantly more inhibitory errors on the anti-saccade task compared to healthy controls.
02There were no significant differences between groups on the reflexive prosaccade task or on correctly performed anti-saccade latencies.
03Correlations between eye movement performance and clinical outcomes like symptom duration did not survive statistical correction for multiple comparisons.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTsWhat it means for OTsWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample size was very small (16 per group), which limits the power to detect subtle effects and increases the risk of Type II errors. The participants were healthy, young, collegiate athletes with above-average intelligence, so results may not generalize to other populations. The study was cross-sectional at a single time point (3-10 days post-injury) rather than longitudinal, so it cannot track how eye movement changes over the course of recovery. No participants experienced loss of consciousness or post-traumatic amnesia, meaning the sample had relatively mild concussions compared to some prior studies.
Declared interests
The authors reported no conflicts of interest. The study was supported by NIH grants.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use eye movement performance to predict when an athlete will recover or return to play. While concussed athletes made more errors on the anti-saccade task, the study found no reliable link between eye movement measures and clinical outcomes like symptom duration after correcting for multiple comparisons.