Assessment of Saccades and Gaze Stability in the Diagnosis of Pediatric Concussion

Objective: To evaluate the discriminatory ability of different repetition increments of saccades and gaze stability testing for diagnosing concussion in adolescents.

Design: Cross-sectional.

Setting: Suburban high school and academic pediatric tertiary care center.

Participants: Sixty-nine adolescent athletes within 28 days of a sports- or recreation-related concussion and 69 adolescent athletes without recent concussion.

Assessment of independent variables: Symptom provocation with horizontal and vertical saccades and gaze stability testing performed up to 30 repetitions.

Main outcome measures: Sensitivity and specificity at 10-repetition increments (≤10, ≤20, ≤30) and area under the receiver operating characteristic curves (AUC) of a visio-vestibular examination (VVE) subscore, scored 0 to 4 based on the number of assessments with symptom provocation, at each repetition increment.

Results: Sensitivity improved when increasing from ≤10 to ≤20 to ≤30 repetitions for horizontal (25% to 50% to 69%) and vertical (32% to 52% to 74%) saccades and horizontal (19% to 45% to 71%) and vertical (23% to 45% to 72%) gaze stability. Specificity was comparable at ≤10 and ≤20 repetitions, but decreased at ≤30 repetitions across assessments. For a VVE subscore (0-4) based on the number of symptomatic assessments, the discriminatory ability of the test was highest at ≤20 repetitions (AUC of 0.79) with an optimal subscore of one (sensitivity 59%, specificity 96%).

Conclusions: A VVE including a higher threshold level of repetitions for saccades and gaze stability has improved discriminatory ability for concussion, with an optimized AUC of 0.79 at ≤20 repetitions.

Clinical relevance: The findings in this study suggest that a higher threshold level of repetitions of 2 commonly used visio-vestibular assessments enables clinicians to more accurately diagnose youth concussion.