Objective: To assist other eye movement investigators in the design and analysis of their studies.
Methods: We examined basic saccadic eye movements and smooth pursuit in the horizontal and vertical
directions with video-oculography in a group of 145 healthy subjects between 19 and 82 years of age.
Results: Gender and education level did not influence eye movement metrics. With age, the latency of
leftward and vertical pro- and antisaccades increased (p < 0.001), velocity of upward prosaccades
decreased (p < 0.001), gain of rightward and upward prosaccades diminished (p < 0.001), and the error
rate of antisaccades increased (p < 0.001). Prosaccades and antisaccades were influenced by the direction
of the target, resulting in a right/left and up/down asymmetry. The skewness of the saccade velocity pro-
file was stable throughout the lifespan, and within the range of saccades analyzed in the present study,
correlated with amplitude and duration only for antisaccades (p < 0.001).
Conclusions: Some eye movement metrics must be separated by the direction of movement, others
according to subject age, while others may be pooled.
Significance: This study provides important information for new oculomotor laboratories concerning the
constitution of subject groups and the analysis of eye movement metrics.

Abstract A distinctive alteration of speech has been reported in patients suffering from ephedrone-induced parkinsonism. However, an objective assessment of dysarthria has not been performed in ephedrone users. We studied 28 young Caucasian men from Georgia with a previous history of ephedrone abuse and compared them to 25 age-matched healthy controls. Speech examination, brain MRI, and NNIPPS-Parkinson plus scale were performed in all patients. The accurate differential diagnosis of dysarthria subtypes was based on the quantitative acoustic analyses of 15 speech dimensions. We revealed a distinct variant of mixed dysarthria with a combination of hyperkinetic and hypokinetic components representing the altered motor programming of dystonia and bradykinesia in ephedrone-induced parkinsonism. According to acoustic analyses, all patients presented at least one affected speech dimension, whereas dysarthria was moderate in 43 % and severe in 36 % of patients. Further findings indicated relationships between motor subscores of dystonia and bradykinesia and speech components of loudness (r = -0.54, p\0.01), articulation (r = 0.40, p\0.05), and timing (r = -0.53, p\0.01). In ephedrone-induced parkinsonism a prominent mixed hyperkinetic–hypokinetic dysarthria occurs that appears related to marked dystonia and bradykinesia and probably reflects manganese induced toxic and neurodegenerative damage to the globus pallidus internus and substantia nigra.

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