Objective: Using changes of perpendicular displacement in digital spiral drawing to evaluate the handwriting severity in essential tremor patients.

Background: Essential tremor patients usually have prominent kinetic tremor, especially when handwriting or holding cups. Neurologists used spiral drawing analysis for severity evaluation subjectively, but sometimes have difficulty in rating subtle changes in those drawings. The changes of perpendicular displacement to center of the spiral drawing under each unit of angle (dr/dθ) could be an indicator for objectively representing tremor severity.

Methods: Ten essential tremor patients were recruited for digitized spiral drawing test. Each drawing was evaluated blindly by a movement disorder specialist with visual rating scale (VRS). All the patients were also rated with Fahn-Tolosa-Marin tremor scale (F-T-M scale) to define the total tremor severity. We analyzed correlation between dr/dθ and patient’s clinical scale.

Results: The parameter dr/dθ has good correlation to clinical VRS (R=0.8436) and F-T-M scales (R=0.8425).

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that dr/dθ in the digitized spiral drawing test can be an object parameter and has good correlation to clinical tremor severity in essential tremor.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/correlation-between-tremor-severity-of-essential-tremor-and-perpendicular-displacement-in-digital-spiral-analysis/