I have another one of those search requests that probably doesn't have a really good answer.

One of our medical students was given the following article: Kim N. Anton syndrome as a result of MS exacerbation. Neurol Clin Pract 2017 Apr;7(2):e19-e22.

Anton(s) syndrome or visual anosognosia (lack of awareness and denial of blindness) is apparently very rare.  According to the articles "only 28 cases have been published between 1965 and 2016."  I'm assuming the author found this information by doing a literature search when she was writing up her case report.

You guessed it, the student's attending wants to know if there have been other case reports since this article and, if so, how many.  Most of the general articles I've found on Anton syndrome since 2017 repeat this same statement about 28 cases.  The article itself only has a few related articles, mainly letters commenting on it.  When I try 'find similar' in Ovid the search goes off into the MS aspect.  Interestingly, the similar function in PubMed (which I'm not as familiar with) returns more citations, but they don't seem particularly relevant either.  Anton syndrome is similar to Anton-Babinski syndrome and cortical blindness, but apparently not quite the same.

I did a Medline search with the textwords and limited to Case Reports and the last 5 years.  This gave me 28 articles.  I did a few other more general searches in Medline and CINAHL.  UpToDate and several Google searches didn't help much.  The ophthalmology textbooks we have in print and online aren't that helpful.  I could go back and search visual anosognosia to see if that brings up any different articles.

It seems to me the most fruitful tactic would be to take citations found by searching anton$ and case reports and just look through them.  That would be a pain, but I'm not sure what else to suggest.  I could try emailing the author of the original article, but I'm not sure how much of a response I'd get.

I'm still the in holiday doldrums, so if any of you have suggestions on a better way to look for this information, please let me know.

Thanks.


Susan E. Harman, MSLS
Medical Staff Library
University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus
827 Linden St.
Baltimore, Md. 21201
410-225-8383
Fax 410-225-8119
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