Potential treatment interventions include splinting, therapeutic exercise, manual stretching, soft tissue and joint mobilization, postural training and bracing, neuromuscular electrical stimulation, constraint-induced movement therapy, activity and environmental modification, and gait training.A patient with dystonia may have significant challenges in activities of daily living (ADL), an area especially suited for treatment by occupational therapy (OT). An occupational therapist (OT) may perform needed upper extremity splinting, provide movement inhibitory techniques, train fine motor coordination, provide an assistive device, or teach alternative methods of activity performance to achieve a patients goals for bathing, dressing, toileting, and other valued activities.Recent research has investigated further into the role of physiotherapy in the treatment of dystonia. A recent study showed that reducing psychological stress, in conjunction with exercise, is beneficial for reducing truncal dystonia in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Another study emphasized progressive relaxation, isometric muscle endurance, dynamic strength, coordination, balance, and body perception, seeing significant improvements to patients quality of life after 4 weeks.Since the root of the problem is neurological, doctors have explored sensorimotor retraining activities to enable the brain to "rewire" itself and eliminate dystonic movements. The work of several doctors such as Nancy Byl and Joaquin Farias has shown that sensorimotor retraining activities and proprioceptive stimulation can induce neuroplasticity, making it possible for patients to recover substantial function that was lost due to Cervical Dystonia, hand dystonia, blepharospasm, oromandibular dystonia, dysphonia and musicians dystonia.Some focal dystonias have been proven treatable through movement retraining in the Taubman approach, particularly in the case of musicians.
Then, dystonia were reported in detail in 1911, when Hermann Oppenheim, Edward Flatau and Wladyslaw Sterling described some Jewish children affected by a syndrome that was retrospectively considered to represent familial cases of DYT1 dystonia. Some decades later, in 1975, the first international conference on dystonia was held in New York. It was then recognized that, in addition to severe generalized forms, the dystonia phenotype also encompasses poorly-progressive focal and segmental cases with onset in adulthood, such as blepharospasm, torticollis and writers cramp. These forms were previously considered independent disorders and were mainly classified among neuroses. A modern definition of dystonia was worded some years later, in 1984. During the following years it became evident that dystonia syndromes are numerous and diversified, new terminological descriptors (e.g., dystonia plus, heredodegenerative dystonias, etc.) and additional classification schemes were introduced. The clinical complexity of dystonia was then fully recognized. See also
References
External links
A Boston Marathon record is about to be set – by a man with a movement disorder in The Washington Post
GeneReview/NIH/UW entry on Dystonia Overview
GeneReviews/NCBI/NIH/UW entry on Early-Onset Primary Dystonia
Film on Dystonia from Public Broadcasting Service
A story of one womans struggle with dystonia at MSNBC.com