ArticleHuman brain mapping2013
Writer's cramp: increased dorsal premotor activity during intended writing.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trial
- Functional anatomy of writing with the dominant hand.PloS one · 2013Trial
- Increased functional connectivity of motor regions and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in musicians with focal hand dystonia.Journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Deep Phenotyping of Musicians' Upper Limb Dystonia.Tremor and other hyperkinetic movements (New York, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Brain network pathophysiology in dystonia.Dystonia (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Temporal Signature of Task-Specificity in Isolated Focal Laryngeal Dystonia.Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society · 2023Article
- Neural Correlates of Executed Compared to Imagined Writing and Drawing Movements: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Effects of non-invasive brain stimulation in dystonia: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Therapeutic advances in neurological disorders · 2022Article
- A connectivity model of the anatomic substrates underlying Gerstmann syndrome.Brain communications · 2022Article
- Cerebello-thalamic activity drives an abnormal motor network into dystonic tremor.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2022Article
- Task-specific interhemispheric hypoconnectivity in writer's cramp - An EEG study.Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2020Article
- Functional and structural neural bases of task specificity in isolated focal dystonia.Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society · 2019Article
- Impaired white matter integrity between premotor cortex and basal ganglia in writer's cramp.Brain and behavior · 2018Article
- Cathodal Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Improves Focal Hand Dystonia in Musicians: A Two-Case Study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2017Article
- Non-Invasive Brain Stimulation for Treatment of Focal Hand Dystonia: Update and Future Direction.Journal of movement disorders · 2016Review
- The brain network reflecting bodily self-consciousness: a functional connectivity study.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2014Article
- Abnormal dorsal premotor-motor inhibition in writer's cramp.Movement disorders : official journal of the Movement Disorder Society · 2014Article
- Focal dystonia and the Sensory-Motor Integrative Loop for Enacting (SMILE).Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2014Review
- The role of domain-general cognitive control in language comprehension.Frontiers in psychology · 2014Article
- Inhibition of the dorsal premotor cortex does not repair surround inhibition in writer's cramp patients.Experimental brain research · 2013Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Simple writer's cramp (WC) is a task-specific form of dystonia, characterized by abnormal movements and postures of the hand during writing. It is extremely task-specific, since dystonic symptoms can occur when a patient uses a pencil for writing, but not when it is used for sharpening. Maladaptive plasticity, loss of inhibition, and abnormal sensory processing are important pathophysiological elements of WC. However, it remains unclear how those elements can account for its task-specificity. We used fMRI to isolate cerebral alterations associated with the task-specificity of simple WC. Subjects (13 simple WC patients, 20 matched controls) imagined grasping a pencil to either write with it or sharpen it. On each trial, we manipulated the pencil's position and the number of imagined movements, while monitoring variations in motor output with electromyography. We show that simple WC is characterized by abnormally increased activity in the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) when imagined actions are specifically related to writing. This cerebral effect was independent from the known deficits in dystonia in generating focal motor output and in processing somatosensory feedback. This abnormal activity of the PMd suggests that the task-specific element of simple WC is primarily due to alterations at the planning level, in the computations that transform a desired action outcome into the motor commands leading to that action. These findings open the way for testing the therapeutic value of interventions that take into account the computational substrate of task-specificity in simple WC, e.g. modulations of PMd activity during the planning phase of writing.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.