Department of Physiology, Hokkaido University School of Medicine, Sapporo 060-8638, Japan.
Eur J Neurosci. 2011 Jun;33(11):2046-57. doi: 10.1111/j.1460-9568.2011.07699.x.
Lesions in the motor thalamus can cause deficits in somatic movements. However, the involvement of the thalamus in the generation of eye movements has only recently been elucidated. In this article, we review recent advances into the role of the thalamus in eye movements. Anatomically, the anterior group of the intralaminar nuclei and paralaminar portion of the ventrolateral, ventroanterior and mediodorsal nuclei of the thalamus send massive projections to the frontal eye field and supplementary eye field. In addition, these parts of the thalamus, collectively known as the 'oculomotor thalamus', receive inputs from the cerebellum, the basal ganglia and virtually all stages of the saccade-generating pathways in the brainstem. In their pioneering work in the 1980s, Schlag and Schlag-Rey found a variety of eye movement-related neurons in the oculomotor thalamus, and proposed that this region might constitute a 'central controller' playing a role in monitoring eye movements and generating self-paced saccades. This hypothesis has been evaluated by recent experiments in non-human primates and by clinical observations of subjects with thalamic lesions. In addition, several recent studies have also addressed the involvement of the oculomotor thalamus in the generation of anti-saccades and the selection of targets for saccades. These studies have revealed the impact of subcortical signals on the higher-order cortical processing underlying saccades, and suggest the possibility of future studies using the oculomotor system as a model to explore the neural mechanisms of global cortico-subcortical loops and the neural basis of a local network between the thalamus and cortex.
丘脑损伤可导致躯体运动障碍。然而，丘脑在眼球运动产生中的作用直到最近才被阐明。本文综述了丘脑在眼球运动中的作用的最新进展。从解剖学上看，丘脑的内侧核群的前群和腹外侧核、腹前核和内侧背核的旁室部分向额眼区和辅助眼区投射大量纤维。此外，这些丘脑的部分，统称为“眼动核”，接收来自小脑、基底神经节以及脑桥中眼球运动产生通路的几乎所有阶段的输入。在 20 世纪 80 年代的开创性工作中，Schlag 和 Schlag-Rey 在眼动核中发现了多种与眼球运动相关的神经元，并提出该区域可能构成一个“中央控制器”，在监测眼球运动和产生自主扫视中发挥作用。这一假说已通过最近在非人类灵长类动物中的实验和对丘脑损伤患者的临床观察进行了评估。此外，最近的几项研究还探讨了眼动核在反扫视产生和扫视目标选择中的作用。这些研究揭示了皮质下信号对视动皮层处理的影响，并为未来的研究提供了可能性，即将眼动系统作为一个模型，以探索皮质下回路的全局神经机制以及丘脑和皮质之间局部网络的神经基础。
