Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

TABES AND OPTIC ATROPHY

1922; BMJ; Volume: 6; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1136/bjo.6.7.289

1468-2079

Leslie Paton,

Drug-Induced Ocular Toxicity

ON looking over a series of visual fields in tabetics, one cannot help being struck by the remarkable variability that they show and the marked disproportion that exists in different cases between the loss of visual acuity and the loss of visual field.Is there anything in the underlying pathological changes which will explain this variability?To determine this, it is necessary to see what has, been learned of the pathology of tabes in general and more particularly of tabetic optic atrophy.I have tried to show in the following paper in how far the process as it concerns the optic nerve, resembles or differs from the process in other parts of the central nervous system.Of necessity, as the literature on the subject is immense, I can only refer to the more outstanding papers that have come to my notice, but I think these show how varied and discordant are the views held as to the nature of tabes.It is obvious that if tabes is a clinical entity, a homogeneous disease, and not simply a heterogeneous collocation of manifesta- tions of later syphilis, there must be some definite relationship in the pathology of the conditions that are found in different parts of the central nervous system; and the variations that occur must be due more to variations in the nature of the tissue attacked than to variations in the virus.