SUMMARY:Balint's syndrome is usually attributed to bilateral parieto-occipital lesions. In several reported cases involvement of the frontal lobes was also documented and could be responsible for the “spasmodic fixation” often recorded in these patients. We report a case of Balint's syndrome in a patient with bilateral frontal and parieto-occipital metastases demonstrated by CTscan and confirmed by postmortem examination.

Simultaneous plasma and cerebrospinal free and sulfoconjugated norepinephrine, epinephrine, dopamine and homovanillic acid determinations in 38 patients with various neurological disorders have shown consistently lower concentrations of dopamine sulfate, norepinephrine sulfate, and epinephrine sulfate in the cerebrospinal fluid than in plasma. An approximately three fold increase of plasma dopamine sulfate concentrations following banana ingestion did not result in increased dopamine sulfate concentrations in cerebrospinal fluid. There were positive correlations between plasma and cerebrospinal fluid concentrations of free norepinephrine and epinephrine as well as norepinephrine sulfate, dopamine sulfate and free homovanillic acid. Cerebrospinal fluid and plasma are apparently separated by the blood-brain barrier impermeable to catecholamine sulfates from the blood. Some other data and the observed positive correlation between cerebrospinal fluid and plasma dopamine and norepinephrine sulfates suggests however that catecholamine sulfates may pass from cerebrospinal fluid to the blood and reflect events in the brain.