Saccade: A Potential Diagnostic Tool and Drug Efficacy Test Criterion for Mental Disorders

Saccades may play an important role in mental disorders research and diagnosis. Not only can saccade be used to help researchers to acquire the early and specific neuropathological changes, but also be a criterion of new drug development and drug efficacy tests. Abnormalities of saccadic eye movement appear in Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and major depressive disorder patients, but difficulties for its applications arise from unclear processes of neuropathological development and individual differences in patients. Establishing nonhuman primates’ model of mental disorders and monitoring saccadic parameters during the model construction will help us to overcome such difficulties.