Eyelid closing and opening disorders in patients with unilateral brain lesions: A case report with video neuroimage and a systematic review of the literature.

ABSTRACT

Eyelid closing or opening disorders have been only sporadically described in patients with focal brain lesions over the last decades. Furthermore, the restricted number of reports and the lack of uniform clinical assessment of affected individuals did not allow to define more in depth the clinical features and the underlying neural correlates of these uncommon clinical disorders. Here we report an 89-years old woman with a right hemispheric lesion who showed a contralesional defect of eyelid closure. We also include a video neuroimage of this case and a review of eyelid closing and opening disorders in patients with focal unilateral lesions. In this review we found a correlation between right hemisphere and eyelid motor control, particularly for apraxia of eyelid closure affecting only the contralesional eye. The right parietal lobe was most frequently affected in this unilateral form of eyelid closing disorders, whereas putamen and other subcortical structures were more involved in eyelid opening than in eyelid closing disorders. The relations between unilateral eyelid closing disorders and other forms of motor-intentional defects are shortly discussed.