Movement cueing and motor execution in patients with dystonia: A kinematic study

✍ Scribed by Antonio Currá; Alfredo Berardelli; Rocco Agostino; Morena Giovannelli; Giacomo Koch; Mario Manfredi

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 137 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-3185
• DOI: 10.1002/1531-8257(200001)15:1<103::aid-mds1016>3.0.co;2-3

✦ Synopsis

To investigate whether the type of movement cueing influences motor performance in patients with dystonia, we studied externally triggered (ET) and self-initiated (SI) sequential rapid arm movements in patients with generalized or focal dystonia and healthy control subjects. The ET task required subjects to initiate movements in response to consecutive visual cues; the SI task allowed them to start at will. To determine whether patients found sequential motor tasks more difficult than single tasks, we also analyzed single ET movements. Control subjects performed the SI task significantly faster than the ET task. Their single ET movements and first ET sequential submovements had similar speeds. Patients with generalized dystonia were slow in performing the single movement, the ET and the SI sequential tasks, and they executed the SI sequence more slowly than the ET. They made long pauses between SI sequential submovements, had longer reaction times during the