Articles

Loss of visual feedback revealing motor impairment – an early symptom of Parkinson’s disease in two Irish farmers

In the absence of visual feedback, humans depend upon proprioceptive information for reaching movements and coordination. Use of sensory information in order to assist movement is impaired in patients with ear...

Authors: Diana A. Olszewska, Conor Fearon and Tim Lynch

Depressive symptoms can amplify embarrassment in essential tremor

Embarrassment can be a considerable problem for patients with essential tremor (ET) and is a major motivator for treatment. Depression is also a common feature of ET; as many as 35 % of patients report moderat...

Authors: Elan D. Louis, Stephanie Cosentino and Edward D. Huey

Automatic behavior and communication due to pramipexole

A 45–year-old woman reported automatic behaviors and communication whilst she was being treated with pramipexole. These episodes vanished after the medication was tapered and she was started on levodopa/carbid...

Authors: Ruth H. Walker

Embouchure dystonia: a video guide to diagnosis and evaluation

Embouchure dystonia is an unusual focal task-specific dystonia affecting the muscles that control the flow of air into the mouthpiece of a brass or woodwind instrument. The complexity of the embouchure and the...

Authors: Steven J Frucht

Cautionary optimism: caffeine and Parkinson’s disease risk

Most Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients present without known family history and without a diagnosed prodromal phase, underscoring the difficulty of employing primary (neuroprevention) and secondary (neuroprote...

Authors: Leonard L. Sokol, Michael J. Young, Alberto J. Espay and Ronald B. Postuma

Motor fluctuations due to interaction between dietary protein and levodopa in Parkinson’s disease

The modulation of levodopa transport across the blood brain barrier by large neutral amino acids is well documented. Protein limitation and protein redistribution diets may improve motor fluctuations in patien...

Authors: Tuhin Virmani, Sirinan Tazan, Pietro Mazzoni, Blair Ford and Paul E. Greene

Evolution of visual art with dopaminergic therapy

A patient with right-side-predominant Parkinson’s disease presented visual artwork which improved in resemblance to the model which he was copying with increasing doses of levodopa. I propose that increased do...

Authors: Ruth H. Walker

The effects of dopamine on digit span in Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease patients are at an elevated risk of developing cognitive impairment. Although cognitive impairment is one of the strongest predictors of quality of life, dopaminergic anti-parkinsonian medi...

Authors: Clara Warden, Jaclyn Hwang, Anisa Marshall, Michelle Fenesy and Kathleen L. Poston

Divergent oral cavity motor strategies between healthy elite and dystonic horn players

This paper describes the use of real-time magnetic resonance imaging in visualizing and quantifying oral cavity motor strategies employed by 6 healthy, elite horn players and 5 horn players with embouchure dys...

Authors: Peter W. Iltis, Jens Frahm, Dirk Voit, Arun Joseph, Erwin Schoonderwaldt and Eckart Altenmüller

Agnosia for head tremor in essential tremor: prevalence and clinical correlates

Lack of awareness of involuntary movements is a curious phenomenon in patients with certain movement disorders. An interesting anecdotal observation is that patients with essential tremor (ET) often seem unawa...

Authors: Hatice N. Eken and Elan D. Louis

Clinical signs in functional (psychogenic) gait disorders: a brief survey

Clinical signs are critical in ascertaining the functional nature of a gait disorder. Four signs of gait impairment have been documented in the course of examining patients with clinically definite functional ...

Authors: Leonard L. Sokol and Alberto J. Espay

Freezing of gait associated with a corpus callosum lesion

Freezing of gait (FoG) is a debilitating feature of Parkinson’s disease and other parkinsonian disorders. This case demonstrates a variant of freezing of gait in a non-parkinsonian patient with a lesion of the...

Authors: Marian L. Dale, Martina Mancini, Carolin Curtze, Fay B. Horak and Brett W. Fling

Postural deformities in Parkinson’s disease –Mutual relationships among neck flexion, fore-bent, knee-bent and lateral-bent angles and correlations with clinical predictors

Various postural deformities appear during progression of Parkinson’s disease (PD), but the underlying pathophysiology of these deformities is not well understood. The angle abnormalities seen in individual pa...

Authors: Fumihito Yoshii, Yusuke Moriya, Tomohide Ohnuki, Masafuchi Ryo and Wakoh Takahashi

Spinal-generated movement disorders: a clinical review

Spinal-generated movement disorders (SGMDs) include spinal segmental myoclonus, propriospinal myoclonus, orthostatic tremor, secondary paroxysmal dyskinesias, stiff person syndrome and its variants, movements ...

Authors: Pichet Termsarasab, Thananan Thammongkolchai and Steven J. Frucht

A novel scale to assess psychosis in patients with parkinson's disease

Organic psychosis effects up to 70 % of patients with PD at some point yet no widely accepted scale for this entity exists.

Authors: William G. Ondo, Sana Sarfaraz and MinJae Lee

The diagnostic value of saccades in movement disorder patients: a practical guide and review

Saccades are rapid eye movements designed to shift the fovea to objects of visual interest. Abnormalities of saccades offer important clues in the diagnosis of a number of movement disorders. In this review, w...

Authors: Pichet Termsarasab, Thananan Thammongkolchai, Janet C. Rucker and Steven J. Frucht

Evaluating the musician with dystonia of the upper limb: a practical approach with video demonstration

Focal task-specific dystonia is an unusual movement disorder that may affect musicians specifically when they perform on their instruments. Muscles of the lower face, lower limb and upper limb may be involved ...

Authors: Steven J. Frucht

Pseudobulbar laughter as a levodopa off phenomenon exacerbated by subthalamic deep brain stimulation

Pseudobulbar affect is a common symptom in neurodegenerative diseases and can also result from lesions in cortical, subcortical and brainstem regions. In Parkinson’s disease (PD), pseudobulbar affect (PBA) can...

Authors: P. K. Chattha, P. E. Greene and Ritesh A. Ramdhani

Jerky dystonic shoulder following infarction of the posterior thalamus

The syndrome of the jerky dystonic hand is recognized as a consequence of infarction of the posterior thalamus. A patient with multiple risk factors for stroke developed jerky dystonia of more proximal involve...

Authors: Ruth H. Walker

Reversible craniocervical dystonia associated with levofloxacin

Dystonia is a hyperkinetic movement disorder related to dysfunction of inhibitory basal ganglia and cortical circuits. GABA is the major inhibitory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. Quinolones ca...

Authors: Karlo J Lizarraga, Maria R Lopez and Carlos Singer

Multidisciplinary intensive rehabilitation treatment improves sleep quality in Parkinson’s disease

Sleep disturbances are among the most common non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD), greatly interfering with daily activities and diminishing life quality. Pharmacological treatments have not been sat...

Authors: Giuseppe Frazzitta, Roberto Maestri, Davide Ferrazzoli, Giulio Riboldazzi, Rossana Bera, Cecilia Fontanesi, Roger P Rossi, Gianni Pezzoli and Maria F Ghilardi

Arrhythmokinesis is evident during unimanual not bimanual finger tapping in Parkinson’s disease

Arrhythmokinesis, the variability in repetitive movements, is a fundamental feature of Parkinson’s disease (PD). We hypothesized that unimanual repetitive alternating finger tapping (AFT) would reveal more arr...

Authors: Megan H Trager, Anca Velisar, Mandy Miller Koop, Lauren Shreve, Emma Quinn and Helen Bronte-Stewart

Effect of prior exposure to dopamine agonists on treatment with gabapentin enacarbil in adults with moderate-to-severe primary restless legs syndrome: pooled analyses from 3 randomized trials

Dopamine agonists (DAs) are a first-line therapy for moderate-to-severe restless legs syndrome (RLS), but these treatments may lead to complications, such as augmentation and impulse control disorders, requiri...

Authors: William G Ondo, Neal Hermanowicz, Diego García Borreguero, Mark J Jaros, Richard Kim and Gwendoline Shang

Lexical diversity in Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative syndrome of the basal ganglia (BG) believed to disrupt cortical-subcortical pathways critical to motor, cognitive and expressive language function. Recent studie...

Authors: Charles Ellis, Yolanda F Holt and Thomas West

Isolated vocal tremor as a focal phenotype of essential tremor: a retrospective case review

Essential tremor (ET) is a common condition associated with significant physical and psychosocial disability. “Classic” ET is a clinical syndrome of action tremor in the upper limbs and less commonly the head,...

Authors: Amar Patel and Steven J Frucht

Repetitive finger movement performance differs among Parkinson’s disease, Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, and spinocerebellar ataxia

Differentiating movement disorders is critical for appropriate treatment, prognosis, and for clinical trials. In clinical trials this is especially important as effects can be diluted by inclusion of inappropr...

Authors: Elizabeth L Stegemöller, Jennifer Uzochukwu, Mark D Tillman, Nikolaus R McFarland, SH Subramony, Michael S Okun and Chris J Hass

Detecting position dependent tremor with the Empirical mode decomposition

Primary bowing tremor (PBT) occurs in violinists in the right bowing-arm and is a highly nonlinear and non-stationary signal. However, Fourier-transform based methods (FFT) make the a priori assumption of line...

Authors: André Lee and Eckart Altenmüller

Cortical Tremor (CT) with coincident orthostatic movements

Cortical tremor (CT) is a form of cortical reflex myoclonus that can mimic essential tremor (ET). Clinical features that are helpful in distinguishing CT from ET are the irregular and jerky appearance of the m...

Authors: Pichet Termsarasab and Steven J Frucht

Severe Sydenham’s chorea (chorea paralytica) successfully treated with plasmapheresis

Sydenham’s chorea is often regarded as a relatively benign and self-limiting condition. Treatment is typically symptomatic, although occasionally immunomodulatory therapies are required in severe forms. Here w...

Authors: Marcelo Miranda, Ruth H Walker, David Saez and Victoria Renner

Freezing of gait and white matter changes: a tract-based spatial statistics study

We hypothesized that the integrity of white matter might be related to the severity of freezing of gait in age-related white matter changes.

Authors: Kazumi Iseki, Hidenao Fukuyama, Naoya Oishi, Hidekazu Tomimoto, Yoshinobu Otsuka, Manabu Nankaku, David Benninger, Mark Hallett and Takashi Hanakawa

Prevalence of depression in Parkinson’s disease patients in Ethiopia

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is associated with cognitive and psychiatric disturbances including depression, anxiety, psychotic symptoms and sleep disturbances. These psychiatric manifestations have a negative imp...

Authors: Dawit Kibru Worku, Yared Mamushet Yifru, Douglas G Postels and Fikre Enquselassie Gashe

Writer’s cramp as a presentation of L-2-hydroxyglutaric aciduria

L-2-hydroxyglutaric aciduria (L2HGA) is a neurometabolic disorder characterized by macrocephaly, seizures, progressive mental retardation, pyramidal signs, ataxia and tremor. Dystonia is an under-recognized fe...

Authors: Pichet Termsarasab and Steven J Frucht

Epidemiology and treatment of 23 musicians with task specific tremor

Task specific tremors in musicians have been mainly described as primary bowing tremor in string instrumentalists in relatively small sample sizes. Our aim was to describe epidemiology, risk factors, phenomeno...

Authors: André Lee, Shinichi Furuya and Eckart Altenmüller

Testosterone level and the effect of levodopa and agonists in early Parkinson disease: results from the INSPECT cohort

To determine if testosterone levels are influenced by dopaminergic therapy in Parkinson disease (PD) patients. Testosterone level has been reported to be low in patients with PD and other neurodegenerative dis...

Authors: Michael S Okun, Samuel S Wu, Dana Jennings, Kenneth Marek, Ramon L Rodriguez and Hubert H Fernandez

Upper facial chorea in Huntington disease

To provide a systematic description of component movements of upper facial chorea in Huntington disease, consecutive videos of 25 active patients with confirmed diagnosis were scored on eye opening, eye closin...

Authors: Robert Fekete and Joseph Jankovic

Clinical and programming pattern of patients with impending deep brain stimulation power failure: a retrospective chart review

It is important to prevent complications of implanted pulse generators (IPG) depletion by replacing the IPG in time.

Authors: Raja Mehanna, Kathy M Wilson, Scott E Cooper, Andre G Machado and Hubert H Fernandez

What light have resting state fMRI studies shed on cognition and mood in Parkinson’s disease?

Much remains unknown about non-motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD), which have variable occurrence, progression, and severity among patients. The existing suite of neuroimaging tools has yielded insight...

Authors: Sophie YorkWilliams and Kathleen L Poston

The phenomenology and natural history of idiopathic lower cranial dystonia

Many patients with lower cranial dystonia (LCrD) are misdiagnosed, and recognition of this condition by general practitioners and dental health professionals is limited.

Authors: Pichet Termsarasab, Donald R Tanenbaum and Steven J Frucht

Hydrocephalic Parkinsonism: lessons from normal pressure hydrocephalus mimics

Hydrocephalus is an under-recognized presentation of progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB).

Authors: Brian W Starr, Matthew C Hagen and Alberto J Espay

Clinical movement disorders – a new era

Authors: Steven J Frucht