Case 6- CharlieCharlie 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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