Department of Ophthalmology, Taipei Veterans General Hospital, No. 201, Sec. 2, Shih-Pai Road, Taipei, Taiwan.
Graefes Arch Clin Exp Ophthalmol. 2011 Jul;249(7):1087-9. doi: 10.1007/s00417-010-1586-4. Epub 2011 Jan 18.
Pure alexia and prosopagnosia are two separate and uncommon disorders of visual recognition in neuro-ophthalmology. We report an extremely rare case of pure alexia coincident with prosopagnosia secondary to occipital arteriovenous malformation. The manifestations of these two visual recognition disorders are also described.
A 35-year-old, left-handed women had suffered from severe blurred vision when recognizing her family's faces and was unable to read or associate separate parts of a word into a whole word. Her visual field revealed slight right homonymous hemianopia. Computed tomography scans and magnetic resonance images were arranged and vertebral angiography confirmed the diagnosis of left occipital arteriovenous malformation.
Gamma-knife stereoscopic radiotherapy was performed. Two months after the treatment, the ability to recognize faces and read improved and the visual field recovered.
Ophthalmologists should keep in mind that usual complaints of "blurred vision" might correlate with unusual visual recognition disorders. Pure alexia and prosopagnosia have not been reported to occur together and the left-handed- dominance in our case leads to this scarce concurrence.
纯失读症和面孔失认症是神经眼科中两种独立且罕见的视觉识别障碍。我们报告了一例极为罕见的病例，该病例继发于枕叶动静脉畸形的纯失读症合并面孔失认症。还描述了这两种视觉识别障碍的表现。
一名 35 岁的左利手女性在识别家人的面孔时出现严重的视力模糊，并且无法阅读或将单词的各个部分联想成一个完整的单词。她的视野显示出轻微的右侧同向性偏盲。安排了计算机断层扫描和磁共振成像，并且椎血管造影证实了左侧枕叶动静脉畸形的诊断。
进行了伽玛刀立体定向放射治疗。治疗后两个月，识别面孔和阅读的能力得到改善，视野恢复。
眼科医生应牢记，通常的“视力模糊”主诉可能与不常见的视觉识别障碍相关。纯失读症和面孔失认症尚未被报道同时发生，而我们的病例中左利手优势导致了这种罕见的并发。
