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...

Background: Klinefelter’s syndrome (KS) has been associated with tremor, but reports on tremor phenomenology and treatment are limited. Case Reports: Patient 1 is a 17-year-old male with a dystonic tremor treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS). Patient 2 is a 57-year-old male with a predominant left hand resting tremor and dystonic features. Discussion: Our cases suggest that the tremor in p...

Pathological tremors are involuntary oscillatory movements which cannot be fully attenuated using conventional treatments. For this reason, several studies have investigated the use of neuromuscular electrical stimulation for tremor suppression. In a recent study, however, we found that electrical stimulation below the motor threshold also suppressed tremor, indicating involvement of afferent p...

OBJECTIVE To compare the cerebral activation pattern during writing of patients with writing tremor with healthy controls using functional MRI METHODS: Three patients with writing tremor and 10 healthy controls were examined using a 1.5 Tesla scanner. All subjects performed a paradigm of alternating 30 second periods of rest or writing. For functional imaging 60 EPI multislice data sets were ac...

BACKGROUND Although thalamic deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been established as an effective therapy for refractory tremor in Parkinson's disease and essential tremor, reports investigating the efficacy of posterior subthalamic area (PSA) DBS for severe, debilitating tremors continue to emerge. However, questions regarding the optimal anatomical target, surgical approach, programming paradigm...

BACKGROUND Action tremor is the hallmark feature of essential tremor (ET). While the tremor typically is mildly asymmetric, in some patients, it is markedly asymmetric. There are few data on factors that influence this asymmetry. ET is also a highly familial disease. Whether the tremor asymmetry profile (i.e., differential expression of tremor in each arm in a given patient) is similar across f...

BACKGROUND Orthostatic tremor is one of the few tremor conditions requiring an electromyogram for definitive diagnosis since leg tremor might not be visible to the naked eye. PHENOMENOLOGY SHOWN An iOS application (iSeismometer, ObjectGraph LLC, New York) using an Apple iPhone 5 (Cupertino, CA, USA) inserted into the patient's sock detected a tremor with a frequency of 16.4 Hz on both legs. ...

BACKGROUND Orthostatic tremor is an uncommon disorder manifest by high frequency, low amplitude leg tremor upon weight bearing. Treatment with oral tremor agents is inconsistent and usually not satisfactory. METHODS We implanted bilateral ventralis intermedius nuclei deep brain stimulators into an 82-year-old male with refractory orthostatic tremor. RESULTS The patient had a marked subjecti...

Introduction Tremor is defined as “a rhythmical involuntary oscillation of a body part”. The main characteristic symptom of the patients with Parkinson disease (PD) and Essential tremor (ET) is tremor. Cells in the thalamic ventral nuclear group fire at frequencies close to that of tremor for patients with PD and ET (Lenz et al., 1994). Tremor can be abolished by localized lesion of the nucleus...