Anton Syndrome

Excerpt

Cortical blindness is among the rare neurological conditions resulting in binocular vision loss due to insult to the occipital cortex. Anton-Babinski syndrome (Anton syndrome or ABS) is visual anosognosia (denial of loss of vision) associated with confabulation (defined as the emergence of memories of events and experiences which never took place) in the setting of obvious visual loss and cortical blindness.

It is essentially neurological visual impairment/disturbance resulting from abnormality or damage in the brain rather than due to eye abnormalities.

The first description of ABS dates back to the Roman era when Seneca, a Roman philosopher and politician, described the case of Harpaste, a slave who acutely became blind. She used to deny her illness and argue irrationally about room darkness and constantly ask her attendants to change quarters. This case demonstrates the main symptoms of ABS, including acutely acquired blindness and anosognosia in the presence of relatively well-preserved cognition.

The next documented description of visual anosognosia was made by the French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne (1533 - 1592), who described a nobleman who denied his blindness. In 1895, the Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist Gabriel Anton (1858 - 1933) described the case of Juliane Hochriehser, a 69-year-old dairymaid who had anosognosia with cortical deafness due to a lesion on her both temporal lobes. He also outlined other cases of patients with objective blindness and deafness who denied their deficits. In 1914, the French-Polish neurologist Joseph François Babinski (1857 - 1932) used for the first time the term “anosognosia” to describe the unawareness of the deficit in patients with hemiplegia.

In 1920 Meyer first reported occipital lobe infarction and postulated compression of branches of the posterior cerebral artery as the causal factor for ABS.