Cortical inhibitory function in cervical dystonia

Christos Ganos; Elisa R Ferrè; Angela Marotta; Panagiotis Kassavetis; John Rothwell; Kailash P Bhatia; Patrick Haggard

doi:10.1016/j.clinph.2017.11.020

Cortical inhibitory function in cervical dystonia

Clin Neurophysiol. 2018 Feb;129(2):466-472. doi: 10.1016/j.clinph.2017.11.020. Epub 2017 Dec 1.

Authors

Christos Ganos¹, Elisa R Ferrè², Angela Marotta³, Panagiotis Kassavetis⁴, John Rothwell⁵, Kailash P Bhatia⁵, Patrick Haggard⁶

Affiliations

¹ Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, University College London, UK; Department of Neurology, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), Hamburg, Germany; Department of Neurology, Charité, University Medicine Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: cganos@gmail.com.
² Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK; Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London, UK.
³ Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK; Department of Neuroscience, Biomedicine and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Italy.
⁴ Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, University College London, UK; Boston University, Neurology Department, Boston, MA, USA.
⁵ Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, University College London, UK.
⁶ Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, UK.

PMID: 29311009
DOI: 10.1016/j.clinph.2017.11.020

Abstract

Objective: To assess the specificity of cortical inhibitory deficits in cervical dystonia patients.

Methods: A systematic test battery was developed to assess spatial and temporal aspects of cortical inhibition, in motor and somatosensory systems of the hand. We tested 17 cervical dystonia (CD) patients and 19 controls assessing somatosensory spatial inhibition (grating orientation test, interdigital feedforward subliminal inhibition), somatosensory temporal inhibition (temporal discrimination threshold, feedforward subliminal inhibition), motor spatial inhibition (surround inhibition), and motor temporal inhibition (short interval intracortical inhibition).

Results: A significant deficit in CD was observed in both measures of somatosensory spatial inhibition, with a trend in the same direction in our measure of motor spatial inhibition. We found no significant group differences in temporal inhibition measures. Importantly, statistical comparison of effect sizes across the different measures showed that deficits in tests of spatial inhibition were greater than those in tests of temporal inhibition.

Conclusion: Our results suggest that CD is associated with abnormal function of local inhibitory cortical circuits subserving spatial sensory processing. Importantly, this abnormality relates to the somatotopic representation of an unaffected body part.

Significance: These results clarify the nature of deficits in cortical inhibitory function in dystonia.

Keywords: Cervical dystonia; Cortical inhibition; Motor systems; Sensory systems.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Aged
Female
Humans
Male
Middle Aged
Motor Cortex / physiopathology*
Neural Inhibition / physiology*
Somatosensory Cortex / physiopathology*
Torticollis / physiopathology*
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation

Abstract

Publication types

MeSH terms

Grants and funding