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Since antiquity, the eyes have been considered windows into the soul. Now, new findings suggest that they are also windows into the autonomic nervous system. The researchers used infrared pupillography to assess pupil responses in 150 patients (cases) with symptomatic autonomic neuropathy due to various disorders: amyloidosis, pure autonomic failure (PAF), diabetes, multisystem atrophy (MSA), and miscellaneous conditions, including paraneoplastic syndrome and hereditary neuropathies. The researchers compared the findings in cases with those in 315 age- and sex-matched healthy controls.
Two thirds of the cases had pupillary abnormalities attributable to autonomic dysfunction, compared with 4.6% of the controls. The authors teased apart the di…