The anatomy of cerebral achromatopsia: A reappraisal and comparison of two case reports
Cortex. 2014-07-01; 56: 138-144
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2013.01.013
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1. Cortex. 2014 Jul;56:138-44. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2013.01.013. Epub 2013 Feb 10.
The anatomy of cerebral achromatopsia: a reappraisal and comparison of two case
reports.
Bartolomeo P(1), Bachoud-Lévi AC(2), Thiebaut de Schotten M(3).
Author information:
(1)Inserm U975; UPMC-Paris6, UMR_S 975; CNRS UMR 7225, Centre de Recherche de
l’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, Groupe Hospitalier
Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France; AP-HP, Groupe Hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière,
Fédération de Neurologie, Paris, France; Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università
Cattolica, Milano, Italy. Electronic address: .
(2)Inserm U955, Equipe 01 Neuropsychologie Interventionnelle, Institut Mondor de
Recherche Biomédicale, Créteil, France; Ecole Normale Supérieure, Institut
d’Etudes Cognitives, Paris, France; Université Paris Est, Faculté de Médecine,
Créteil, France; AP-HP, Hôpital Henri Mondor – Albert Chenevier, Centre de
référence Maladie de Huntington, Créteil, France.
(3)Inserm U975; UPMC-Paris6, UMR_S 975; CNRS UMR 7225, Centre de Recherche de
l’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière, Groupe Hospitalier
Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France; Natbrainlab, Department of Forensic and
Neurodevelopmental Sciences, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London,
London, UK.
Brain damage can produce acquired deficits of color perception, or cerebral
achromatopsia. In these patients, lesions tend to overlap on a restricted region
in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, close to the reported locations of the
putative V4 complex and to foci of increased blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD)
activity related to color perception in normal participants. Unilateral lesions
give rise to achromatopsia in the contralateral visual field (hemiachromatopsia).
Here we present a partial English translation of the first case report of a
hemiachromatopsic patient with detailed anatomical evidence (Madame R., Verrey,
1888), and discuss these results in relation to a more recent case report (Madame
D., Bartolomeo et al., 1997) of a patient with two consecutive hemorrhagic
lesions in the occipitotemporal regions of the two hemispheres. Strikingly,
Madame D. developed full-field achromatopsia after the second lesion in the right
hemisphere, without having shown any signs of hemiachromatopsia after the first
lesion in the left hemisphere. Thanks to the comparison of the reconstructed
lesion patterns between the two patients and with the putative location of
color-related areas in the human brain, we offer a possible, if speculative,
account of this puzzling pattern of anatomo-clinical correlations, based on
intra- and inter-hemispheric connectivity.
Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2013.01.013
PMID: 23473619 [Indexed for MEDLINE]