12 Facts About Cerebral polyopia

Cerebral diplopia or polyopia describes seeing two or more images arranged in ordered rows, columns, or diagonals after fixation on a stimulus.

Cerebral polyopia is sometimes confused with palinopsia, in which multiple images appear while watching an object.

Cerebral polyopia has been reported in extrastriate visual cortex lesions, which is important for detecting motion, orientation, and direction.

Cerebral polyopia often occurs in homonymous field deficits, suggesting deafferentation hyperexcitability could be a possible mechanism, similar to visual release hallucinations.

Cerebral polyopia is most often associated with occipital or temporal lobe lesions, as well as occipital lobe epilepsy.

Onset of Cerebral polyopia is not immediate upon perception of visual stimuli; rather, it occurs within milliseconds to seconds of fixation upon a stimulus.

Some cases have shown that Cerebral polyopia is experienced when the infarctions were seen to be at the tips and outer surfaces of the occipital lobes.

Mechanism of infarction differs by patient, but polyopia is experienced most commonly in patients that suffer from epilepsy in the occipital cortex, or in patients who suffer from cerebral strokes.

In cases of epilepsy, Cerebral polyopia is often experienced alongside palinopsia as these two conditions share an epileptic mechanism.

Preliminary theory of cerebral polyopia proposed by Bender postulated that polyopia occurs as a result of instability of fixation due to occipital lobe disease.

However, Bender's theory does not account for recent studies in which fixation did not change and no eye movements were produced while Cerebral polyopia was experienced, therefore polyopic images were not a result of involuntary eye movements.

In other cases of Cerebral polyopia, it is necessary to determine all other present visual disturbances before attempting treatment.