Limb dystonia can occur in primary dystonias or as a complication in neurodegenerative diseases e.g. Huntington’s disease, Wilson’s disease or Parkinson syndromes or other diseases like structural brain damage, peripheral trauma or drug-induced. Any muscle group under voluntary control can be affected, dystonic muscle overactivity can occur during rest, be aggravated by movement, or occur only ...

abstract bachground: the main objective of this study was to define the clinical changes of facial deformity in patients older than 5 years with congenital torticollis treated by proximal and distal sternocleidomastoid tenotomy. methods: we retrospectively evaluated fifteen patients who had had an open tenotomy of the sternal and clavicular and mastoid origins of the sternocleidomastoid muscle ...

Radiation plexopathy produces numbness, weakness, and reflex changes.1 Excess motor unit activity (EMUA) after irradiation manifests as myokymia and neuromyotonia in affected muscles.2,3 A 65-year-old woman presented with a pulling sensation in the left axilla and intermittent depression of the left arm of 3 to 4 months duration. Ten months earlier she had completed chemotherapy and radiation t...

INTRODUCTION The pathophysiology of writer's cramp, a task-specific dystonia, remains unclear. The objective of this study was to investigate the basal ganglia circuit and the cerebellum during a complex motor sequence learning task carried out with the nonaffected hand in writer's cramp patients. METHODS We applied structural and functional imaging in 22 writer's cramp patients and 28 matche...

Task-specific focal dystonias are thought to be due to a combination of individual vulnerability and environmental factors. There are no case-control studies of risk factors for writer's cramp. We undertook a case-control study of 104 consecutive patients and matched controls to identify risk factors for the condition. We collected detailed data on medical history and writing history as part of...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Extracorporeal shock wave therapy (ESWT) has been shown to reduce hypertonia in patients with upper motor neuron syndrome without any side effect. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether ESWT could be useful also in patients with dystonia. METHODS We evaluated three patients with secondary dystonia and three patients with idiopathic writer's cramp. Placeb...

Cathelicidins are a family of peptides thought to provide an innate defensive barrier against a variety of potential microbial pathogens. The human and mouse cathelicidins (LL-37 and CRAMP, respectively) are expressed at select epithelial interfaces where they have been proposed to kill a number of gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria. To determine if these peptides play a part in the prote...

We established a new disease autosomal dominant hereditary motor and sensory neuropathy with proximal dominant involvement (HMSNP) in 1997, in Okinawa, Japan. This disease is characterized by proximal dominant neurogenic atrophy with fasciculations, painful muscle cramp, obvious sensory nerve involvement, areflexia, high incidence of elevated creatine kinase levels, hyperlipidemia and hyperglyc...