Aberrant learning in individuals who perform repetitive skilled hand movements: Focal hand dystonia—Part 2

Abstract

Byl et al. carried out a variety of clinical studies to gather more evidence to support the presence of sensory discrimination problems in patients with focal hand dystonia and the effectiveness of sensorimotor learning based training for FHd. ( Byl and McKenzie, 2000 Byl N.N. McKenzie A. Treatment effectiveness for patients with a history of repetitive hand use and focal hand dystonia: a planned, prospective follow-up study. Journal of Hand Therapy. 2000; 13: 289-301 Abstract Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (112) Google Scholar ; Byl and McKenzie et al., 2000 Byl N.N. McKenzie A. et al. Differences in somatosensory hand organization in a healthy flutist and a flutist with focal hand dystonia: a case report. Journal of Hand Therapy. 2000; 13: 302-309 Abstract Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (57) Google Scholar , Byl et al., 2003 Byl N. Nagarajan S.S. McKenzie A.A. Effect of sensory discrimination training on structure and function in patients with focal hand dystonia: three case studies. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. 2003; PubMed Google Scholar ; McKenzie and Nargarjuna et al., 2003 McKenzie A.L. Nargarjuna S.S. et al. Somatosensory representation of the digits and clinical performance in patients with focal hand dystonia. American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. 2003; 82: 737-749 Crossref PubMed Scopus (59) Google Scholar ) The goals of this series of experiments were to: (1)describe the neurophysiological and clinical correlates of patients with focal hand dystonia (Experiments I); (2)outline the differences in sensorimotor function by severity of focal hand dystonia (Experiment II); (3)evaluate the effectiveness of learning based sensorimotor training on the remediation of focal hand dystonia (Experiment III); (4)relate change in clinical function with change in cortical structure following a learning based sensorimotor retraining program (Experiments IV and V).