Study of saccadic eye movement in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder

Recent studies have postulated that impairment of behavior inhibition, leading to executive dysfunction in future, is the fundamental pathophysiology of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD). To evaluate this, we studied two saccadic eye movement tasks: visual- and memory-guided, in 8 children with AD/HD (combined type;mean age, 9.1 years, range 6 approximately 11 years) and 16 healthy children (mean age, 9.2 years, range 6 approximately 12 years). In the memory-guided saccade task, reflexive anticipatory errors were more frequently observed in AD/HD than in controls. The children with AD/HD showed longer response latency in the memory-guided saccade task, and greater coefficient of variation in both the latency and amplitude in both the tasks. These results suggested that saccade tasks, especially the memory-guided task, may be useful in clarifying pathophysiology of AD/HD.