The occurrence of Parkinson's disease and of essential tremor was examined in the parents and siblings of 52 Parkinson's disease patients with onset before the age of 45 years. The expected numbers of cases with Parkinson's disease or essential tremor were calculated according to the age and sex specific incidence rates of Parkinson's disease and essential tremor in the general population. Amon...

Essential tremor (ET) is one of the most common movement disorders in the world, with prevalence rates in the general population ranging from 0.4% to 4.6%. The incidence of ET increases with age, with the average age at onset in mid-to-late 40s. ET is estimated to affect as many as 7 to 10 million Americans. Clinically, ET is characterized by bilateral, symmetric, postural tremor in hands and f...

BACKGROUND Hypertrophic olivary degeneration (HOD) is a rare phenomenon, probably related to transsynaptic degeneration of the inferior olivary nucleus. It usually occurs as a response to primary injury of dento-rubro-olivary pathways. CASE REPORT A young man developed Holmes' tremor 7 months after a cavernous malformation bleed in the midbrain. Typical findings of HOD were observed in the ma...

BACKGROUND Psychogenic or functional movement disorders (PMDs) pose a challenge in clinical diagnosis. There are several clues, including sudden onset, incongruous symptoms, distractibility, suggestibility, entrainment of symptoms, and lack of response to otherwise effective pharmacological therapies, that help identify the most common psychogenic movements such as tremor, dystonia, and myoclon...

INTRODUCTION Various presentations of essential palatal myoclonus, a condition characterized by clicking noises and palatal muscle spasm, have been reported in the literature. We are reporting the first case of essential palatal myoclonus following dental treatment. CASE PRESENTATION A 31-year-old Caucasian man presented to our Ear, Nose and Throat department complaining of objective clicking...

To test the alleged genetic linkage between essential tremor and Parkinson's disease, the relatives of patients with essential tremor were examined to see whether Parkinson's disease occurred more frequently than expected. There was no increase of Parkinson's disease in the essential tremor families. It is concluded that essential tremor and Parkinson's disease are genetically independent disea...

Classic essential tremor is a clinical syndrome of action tremor in the upper limbs (at least 95 % of patients) and less commonly the head, face/jaw, voice, tongue, trunk, and lower limbs, in the absence of other neurologic signs. However, the longstanding notion that essential tremor is a monosymptomatic tremor disorder is being challenged by a growing literature describing associated disturba...

Research with community- and clinic-based samples of essential tremor (ET) sufferers has identified embarrassment as a common consequence of the condition, leading to social anxiety and avoidance. We sought to ascertain whether psychological avoidance was related to embarrassment in ET, and whether any such relation was independent of symptom severity. Establishing whether psychological avoidan...

We investigate the relationship between the extensor electromyogram (EMG) and tremor times series in physiological hand tremor by cross-spectral analysis. Special attention is directed to the phase spectrum and the effects of observational noise. We calculate the theoretical phase spectrum for a second-order linear stochastic process and compare the results to measured tremor data recorded from...