Cheap test as good as MRI to detect stroke

BALTIMORE, Sept. 22 (UPI) -- A simple, one-minute eye movement exam worked better than magnetic resonance imaging to distinguish new strokes, U.S. researchers said.

Dr. David E. Newman-Toker of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Illinois in Peoria, said people experiencing a stroke have eye-movement alterations that correlate with stroke-damage to various brain areas -- and these are distinct from eye-movement alterations seen with benign ear diseases.

Some patients, for example, can't immediately adjust their eye position if their heads are quickly turned to the side, or they experience jerky eye movements as they try to focus on a doctor's finger when looking to either side.

The findings, published in the journal Stroke, found the quick, extremely low-cost exam caught more strokes than the current gold standard of MRI.

"The idea that a bedside exam could outperform a modern neuroimaging test such as MRI is something that most people had given up for dead, but we've shown it's possible," Newman-Toker says in a statement.

Dizziness is the cause of some 2.6 million U.S. emergency room visits annually and the vast majority of these complaints are caused by benign inner-ear balance problems. But 4 percent are signals of stroke or transient ischemic attack -- a condition that often warns of impending stroke in the coming days or weeks.