Line bisection in unilateral homonymous visual field defects

Abstract

The contralesional line bisection error in unilateral homonymous hemianopia is a frequent but neglected clinical phenomenon. Our knowledge about this bisection error is based on small samples of hemianopic patients. Moreover, horizontal line bisection has never been investigated in other unilateral visual field defects. The present study is the first to examine line bisection in a large, representative sample of patients with unilateral homonymous visual field defects. We investigated horizontal line bisection in 129 patients with left- or right-sided homonymous hemianopia (60.5%), upper and lower quadranopia (24.8%), and paracentral scotoma (14.7%), and determined the magnitude and direction of line bisection error. The contralesional horizontal line bisection error was present not only in patients with hemianopia but also in those with upper or lower quadranopia or paracentral scotoma. Neither the type nor the severity of the visual field defect was found to determine the bisection error. Only the side of the field defect seemed to determine the horizontal direction of the bisection error (left-/rightward). The contralesional bisection error is not a specifically "hemianopic" phenomenon. It is frequently associated with any unilateral homonymous visual field defect, i.e., hemianopia, upper/lower quadranopia, paracentral scotoma. Moreover, our results further support the recent finding that the contralesional bisection error is not a direct consequence of the visual field defect. Yet, they also suggest that, although the visual field defect does not seem to be the primary cause of the contralesional bisection error, it may nevertheless contribute to it.