BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Children with congenital hemiparesis have greater asymmetry in diffusion parameters of the pyramidal tracts compared with control subjects. We hypothesized that the asymmetry correlates with the severity of hemiparesis and that diffusion metrics would be abnormal in the affected tracts and normal in the unaffected tracts. MATERIALS AND METHODS Fifteen patients with cong...

OBJECTIVE To investigate whether rotator cuff tendinopathy leads to changes in central motor representation of a rotator cuff muscle, and to assess whether such changes are related to pain intensity, pain duration, and physical disability. METHODS Using transcranial magnetic stimulation, motor representation of infraspinatus muscle was assessed bilaterally in patients with unilateral rotator ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Clinically, Parkinson's disease (PD) presents with asymmetric motor symptoms. The left nigrostriatal system appears more susceptible to early degeneration than the right, and a left-lateralized pattern of early neuropathological changes is also described in several neurodegenerative conditions, including Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia, and Huntington's disea...

Variability in the functional topography of area 4 was examined in adult squirrel monkeys. Conventional intracortical microstimulation techniques were used to derive detailed maps (250 microns interpenetration distances) of distal forelimb movement representations in both hemispheres of six monkeys. Spatial features of these representational maps were then compared to the hand preferred by the ...

Bilateral subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN DBS) can reduce working memory while improving motor function in Parkinson disease (PD), but findings are variable. One possible explanation for this variability is that the effects of bilateral STN DBS on working memory function depend in part on functional or disease asymmetry. The goal of this study was to determine the relative contr...

This study examined the influence of motor symptom asymmetry in Parkinson's disease (PD) on Grooved Pegboard (GP) performance in right-handed participants. The Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale was used to assess motor symptoms and separate participants with PD into two groups (right-arm affected, left-arm affected) for comparison with a group of healthy older adults. Participants comple...

The excitability of the motor cortex to magnetic stimulation was evaluated in seven patients with cerebellar lesions (six patients with a unilateral lesion) and in 20 control subjects. Magnetic motor threshold was defined at rest. In all but one of the patients with a hemicerebellar lesion the threshold was higher in the motor cortex contralateral to the impaired hemicerebellum and the right/le...

The effect of unimanual practice of the non-preferred hand on manual asymmetry and manual preference for sequential finger movements was evaluated in right-handers before, immediately after, and 30 days following practice. The results demonstrate that unimanual practice induced a persistent shift of manual preference for the experimental task in most participants, but no significant correlation...