BACKGROUND The aim was to assess incidence, prevalence and risk factors of medication-induced tremor in African-Caribbean patients with severe mental illness (SMI). METHOD A prospective study of SMI patients receiving care from the only mental health service of the previous Dutch Antilles. Eight clinical assessments, over 18 years, focused on movement disorders, medication use, and resting tr...

INTRODUCTION Although syndromes that cause voice tremor have singular characteristics, the differential diagnosis of these diseases is a challenge because of the overlap of the existing signs and symptoms. OBJECTIVE To develop a task-specific protocol to assess voice tremor by means of nasofibrolaryngoscopy and to identify those tasks that can distinguish between essential and dystonic tremor...

BACKGROUND While tremor in Parkinson's Disease (PD) can be characterised in the consulting room, its relationship to treatment and fluctuations can be clinically helpful. OBJECTIVE To develop an ambulatory assessment of tremor of PD. METHODS Accelerometry data was collected using the Parkinson's KinetiGraph System (PKG, Global Kinetics). An algorithm was developed, which could successfully ...

The influence of alterations in visual guidance and somaesthetic sensory inputs was studied in five patients with kinetic and postural tremor characteristic of cerebellar impairment. The patients performed wrist flexion-extension movements or movements about the shoulder with or without visual guidance. Different types of mechanical loads were applied to oppose the wrist movements. The tremor w...

The changes in postural tremor of the hand produced by moderate cooling of the muscles of one forearm have been investigated in 16 normal subjects and in 16 patients with essential tremor. In both groups, cooling produced a profound long lasting decrease in tremor level of the ipsilateral hand. In normal subjects, although cooling reduced the tremor size, the EMG of the active muscle clearly in...

BACKGROUND Gamma knife thalamotomy (GKT) has been used as a therapeutic option for patients with disabling tremor refractory to medications. Impressive improvement of tremor has been reported in the neurosurgical literature, but the reliability of such data has been questioned. OBJECTIVE To prospectively evaluate clinical outcomes after GKT for disabling tremor with blinded assessments. DES...

Tremor is a disabling condition for a large segment of population, mainly elderly. To the present date, there are no adequate tools to diagnose and help rehabilitation of subjects with tremor, but recently there is a tremendous surge of interest in the research in the field. We report on the use of fuzzy methods in applications for rehabilitation, namely in tremor diagnosing and control. We syn...

BACKGROUND 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, jaw, voice, trunk, or lower limbs. Current diagnostic criteria for ET exclude isolated vocal tremor (IVT). Failure to recognize IVT as a form of ET may contribute to misdiagnos...

BACKGROUND The pathophysiology of essential tremor, especially at the cellular level, is poorly understood. Although no drug has been specifically designed to treat essential tremor, several medications improve tremor, and others worsen it. Studying the mechanism of actions of these medications can help our understanding of tremor pathophysiology and contribute to future rational drug design. ...

Tremor, an involuntary, rhythmic, oscillatory movement of a body part, is the most common movement disorder encountered in clinical practice. Rest tremors occur in a body part that is relaxed and completely supported against gravity. Action tremors occur with voluntary contraction of a muscle and can be further subdivided into postural, isometric, and kinetic tremors. All persons have low-ampli...