Publications

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disorder causing slowness and decreased movement size, affecting writing performance. Current available treatments for PD patients are unable to slow down the course of the disease, can induce motor fluctuations and offer only limited symptomatic relief. Motor relearning may partially alleviate the functional impact of PD. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has the potential to boost ...

Background: Deficits in fine motor skills may impair device manipulation including touchscreens in people with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Objectives: To investigate the impact of PD and anti-parkinsonian medication on the ability to use touchscreens. Methods: Twelve PD patients (H&Y II-III), OFF and ON medication, and 12 healthy controls (HC) performed tapping, single and multi-direction sliding tasks on a touchscreen and a mobile phone task ...

INTRODUCTION: Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) can suffer from sudden movement arrests during upper limb tasks. The current study investigated a test to assess freezing of the upper limbs (FOUL) at two speed conditions to improve the sensitivity of FOUL detection. METHODS: Forty-nine patients with PD and 10 age-matched controls (HC) performed a freezing-provoking writing task, requiring up- and down-stroke writing at varying sizes ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Dual-task interventions show positive effects in people with Parkinson disease (PD), but it remains unclear which factors determine the size of these benefits. As a secondary analysis of the DUALITY trial, the aim of this study was to assess the determinants of the effect size after 2 types of dual-task practice. METHODS: We randomly allocated 121 participants with PD to receive either integrated or consecutive dual-task ...

Recently, it was shown that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and freezing of gait (FOG) can also experience freezing episodes during handwriting and present writing problems outside these episodes. So far, the neural networks underlying increased handwriting problems in subjects with FOG are unclear. This study used dynamic causal modeling of fMRI data to investigate neural network dynamics underlying freezing-related handwriting problems ...

BACKGROUND: Handwriting in Parkinson's disease (PD) features specific abnormalities which are difficult to assess in clinical practice since no specific tool for evaluation of spontaneous movement is currently available. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to validate the 'Systematic Screening of Handwriting Difficulties' (SOS-test) in patients with PD. METHODS: Handwriting performance of 87 patients and 26 healthy age-matched controls was examined using ...

BACKGROUND: In previous work, we found that intensive amplitude training successfully improved micrographia in Parkinson's disease (PD). Handwriting abnormalities in PD also express themselves in stroke duration and writing fluency. It is currently unknown whether training changes these dysgraphic features. OBJECTIVE: To determine the differential effects of amplitude training on various hallmarks of handwriting abnormalities in PD. METHODS: We ...

© 2016 Heremans et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Background: Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and freezing of gait (FOG) suffer from more impaired motor and cognitive functioning than their non-freezing counterparts. This underlies ...

BACKGROUND: Recent studies show that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and freezing of gait (FOG) experience motor problems outside their gait freezing episodes. Because handwriting is also a sequential movement, it may be affected in PD patients with FOG relative to those without. OBJECTIVE: The current study aimed to assess the quality of writing in PD patients with and without FOG in comparison to healthy controls (CTs) during various ...