Abstract
Abstract: Essential tremor is a neurological disorder with a tremor of the arms and hands. It is well known thatessential tremor is characterized by the postural tremor and the action tremor. There has been no report on the quan-titative difference in the characteristics of two tremor types. The purpose of this study was to investigate the possibledifference in tremor characteristics of postural and action tremors. Seventeen patients with essential tremor (68.9± 7.9years, 7 men, 10 women) participated in this study. Patients performed the tasks of postural maintenance (armsoutstretched) and daily actions (spiral drawing). Three-axes (pitch, roll and yaw) gyro sensors were attached on indexfinger, back of hand and forearm, from which the segment and the joint angular velocities were calculated. Outcomemeasure was the tremor amplitude defined as the root-mean-square mean of the vector-sum angular velocity at seg-ments and joints. Two-way ANOVA showed that task and joint had main factor on the tremor amplitude (p 0.05). However, tremor amplitude at the wrist joint differed among the tasks (p < 0.05), and it was greater inthe action tasks than in postural task. Tremor was greater at finger segments than at hand and forearm and itincreased in action tasks. The results of this study would be helpful for the understanding and task-specific treat-ments of the essential tremor.Key words: essential tremor, task specific, angular velocity, action tremor, postural tremor
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