Case 6- Charlie

Charlie was in a car accident during which several of his bones broke. He appeared to be
fine other than his obvious injuries, but three days later he suffered a fat embolism. It occurred in
his posterior cerebral arteries and initially resulted in cortical blindness. His vision soon returned
but he continued to have vision trouble and could not attend to more than one object at a time
and was unable to track objects with his eyes. Charlie underwent intense neuropsychological
evaluation and was found that he never once made eye contact during all of his examinations.
When Charlie is shown two objects overlapping each other, he could only recognize one object
and not the other.
From these symptoms, we can narrow Charlies symptoms to two syndromes. The two
syndromes are Posterior Cerebral Artery Syndrome (PCAS) and Blint's syndrome. PCAS has
symptoms very close to the ones described. Some of these include cortical blindness and ataxia,
but include symptoms that Charlie did not have, such as prosopagnosia and dyslexia. However,
Blints' syndrome and its syndrome are much more accurate for describing Charlies symptoms.
These symptoms include ocular apraxia and ataxia, and simultanagnosia.So the doctors came to
the conclusion that Charlie has Blints' syndrome.
Blints' syndrome is caused by bilateral damage to the posterior parietal cortex. It is also
caused by damage to parietal-occipital vascular border zone. We could see that both hemispheres
are affected because of the vision of the patient, so they can only focus on item at a time.
Typically, the posterior parietal cortex is responsible for visuo-spatial perception and spatial
attention, which is clearly affected here. The prognosis of this will depend on the overall
severeness of Charlies case. Most likely, it will cause complications in Charlies life in living
and doing anything as simple as pouring water, but nothing of the syndrome is fatal.

Sources
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Clinical Assessment of Complex Visual Dysfunction. (2001, January 1). Retrieved March 25,
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EA, L. (1996, June 18). Balint's syndrome arising from bilateral posterior cortical atrophy.
Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8783001
Rizzo, M., & Vecera, S. (2002, February 1). Psychoanatomical substrates of Blint's syndrome.
Retrieved March 25, 2015, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1737727/
The enigma of Blint's syndrome: Complexity of neural substrates and cognitive deficits |
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http://journal.frontiersin.org/researchtopic/1083