Chapter 16:
I know someone who has Parkinson’s disease and I watch how it affects her life. Before she started taking medication, she had hand tremors and dull facial expressions. Now you wouldn’t even know she had a disease, because her symptoms are less severe and less noticeable.
The current study wants to determine a way to distinguish Parkinson’s disease (PD) symptoms from essential tremors (ET), or aging tremors. They seek to do this with TCS, transcranial sonography. TCS has not been widely used, but it is shown to be a valid neuroimaging tool for verifying PD. They wanted to determine if TCS could differentiate symptoms between ET and PD.
190 individuals participated in the study, 80 had PD and 30 had ET. There were 80 healthy control subjects. The researcher was blind to the state of the patient. They used TCS to examine the temporal axial plane and the lateral part of mesencephalon, or the central part of the substantia nigra (SN). Dopamine cells degenerate at the SN, which produces PD symptoms.
The statistics used were Mann Whitney U, Kruskal Wallis, and Pearson and Spearman correlations.
Since hyperechogenicity of the substantia nigra is a reliable marker of PD, this study also confirmed the fact. The researchers were not sure what caused the hyperechogenicity but other studies have reported it is because of too much iron. However, hyperechogenicity is common in other disorders as well, so PD regularly goes misdiagnosed. The researcher confirmed TCS was useful in distinguishing PD from ET.
Budisic, M., Trkanjec, Z, Bosnjak, J., Lovrencic-Huzjan, A., Vukovic, V., Demarin, V. (2009). Distinguishing Parkinson’s disease and essential tremor with transcranial sonography. ACTA NEUROLOGICA SCANDINAVICA, 119, 17-21. Retrieved from EbscoHost. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-0404.2008.01056.x
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