BACKGROUND Little is known about the quality of life in patients with cervical dystonia, although pain and depression are relatively common. OBJECTIVE To test the hypothesis that an individual's ability to cope with the disease will modify the association of intrinsic, extrinsic, and disease related factors with quality of life. METHODS Patients with cervical dystonia diagnosed by a movemen...

Cervical dystonia, or torticollis, is perhaps the most common form of focal dystonia. The discovery that botulinum toxin was beneficial in the treatment of this disorder had a twofold impact. First, it silenced a small minority of physicians who believed that this disorder had a psychogenic basis despite convincing evidence to the contrary. Second, it alerted physicians to the broad potential o...

The local injection of botulinum toxin is accepted as the first-line treatment of primary cervical dystonia. This approach provides adequate symptomatic relief for most patients, but up to one-third will have an unsatisfactory response. Deep brain stimulation of the globus pallidus internus has been increasingly used in dystonic syndromes that are refractory to best pharmacological approaches. ...

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) at the internal globus pallidus (GPi) is currently approved for the treatment of primary generalized and segmental dystonia. Younger age at surgery, shorter disease duration, and absence of fixed skeletal deformities correlate with a better response to stimulation. Patients with cervical dystonia may also improve. As a group, patients with secondary dystonias respon...

Dystonia is a brain disorder causing involuntary, often painful movements. Apart from a role for dopamine deficiency in some forms, the cellular mechanisms underlying most dystonias are currently unknown. Here, we discover a role for deficient eIF2α signaling in DYT1 dystonia, a rare inherited generalized form, through a genome-wide RNAi screen. Subsequent experiments including patient-derived ...

[This corrects the article on p. 165 in vol. 7, PMID: 27733842.].

Cervical dystonia is characterized by abnormal posturing of the head, often combined with tremor-like oscillatory head movements. The nature and source of these oscillatory head movements is controversial, so they were quantified to delineate their characteristics and develop a hypothetical model for their genesis. A magnetic search coil system was used to measure head movements in 14 subjects ...