Impairment of a parieto-premotor network specialized for handwriting in writer's cramp.

ABSTRACT: Handwriting with the dominant hand is a highly skilled task singularly acquired in humans. This skill is the isolated deficit in patients with writer's cramp (WC), a form of dystonia with maladaptive plasticity, acquired through intensive and repetitive motor practice. When a skill is highly trained, a motor program is created in the brain to execute the same movement kinematics regardless of the effector used for the task. The task- and effector-specific symptoms in WC suggest that a problem particularly occurs in the brain when the writing motor program is carried out by the dominant hand. In this MRI study involving 12 WC patients (with symptoms only affecting the right dominant hand during writing) and 15 age matched unaffected controls we showed that: (1) the writing program recruited

SUBMITTER: Gallea C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5217828 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature