Active clinical trials for "Tremor"

This study will be a single-centre, prospective, single-arm, open-label, 12-week pilot trial assessing the safety and preliminary efficacy of a second MR-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) thalamotomy on the naïve brain hemisphere after 48 weeks or more of the first MRgFUS thalamotomy in patients with medication-refractory ET. This study will be conducted at the Focused Ultrasound Centre of Excellence at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre/University of Toronto.

This is an investigator-initiated trial. In this 6-month open label, single arm, exploratory pilot study, the investigator intends to enroll a pilot sample of 25 patients with Parkinson's disease who are being started on the novel FDA approved medication "Istradefylline'' as an add on therapy for management of their motor symptoms (based on the judgment of the movement disorders specialist, if patients are in sub-optimal management of their symptoms on maximum tolerable dose of their dopaminergic medications). The investigator will evaluate their motor symptoms before starting the new medication, including their MDS-UPDRS total and MDS-UPDRS-III scores.

A study to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of ExAblate transcranial MRgFUS Thalamotomy treatment of medication refractory tremor-related diseases subjects with low skull density ratio (SDR) value. Essential tremor (ET) and Parkinson disease (PD) are the most prevalent tremor disorders. ET, considered as a pure tremor disease, is characterized by upper limb intention or postural tremor, while PD is characterized by a variety of motor and non-motor symptoms, among them rest tremor. A number of studies have demonstrated that Magnetic resonance-guided focused ultrasound (MRgFUS) thalamotomy is a minimally invasive and effective procedure suitable for medication-refractory tremor in patients with ET and patients with PD. However, the skull is the main barrier to MRgFUS thalamotomy therapy and patients are screened by calculating SDR value before treatment. The US FDA recommended SDR value >0.45±0.05 as the inclusion criterion for screening patients with tremor treated by MRgFUS system. However, about 20%-50% of patients with SDR value are lower than this standard, which makes this part of patients excluded and unable to accept this treatment with many advantages such as non-invasive, no need for general anesthesia, and no need for hardware implantation. Therefore, this study intended to evaluate the safety and effectiveness of MRgFUS thalamotomy in the treatment of tremor-related patients with low SDR value, so as to provide clinical basis for more patients with tremor to benefit from this treatment.

Essential tremor is an incurable, degenerative brain disorder that results in increasingly debilitating tremor, and afflicts an estimated 7 million people in the US. In one study, 25% of essential tremor patients were forced to change jobs or take early retirement because of tremor. Essential tremor is directly linked to progressive functional impairment, social embarrassment, and even depression. The tremor associated with essential tremor is typically slow, involves the hands (and sometimes the head and voice), worsens with intentional movements, and is insidiously progressive over many years. Deep brain stimulation has emerged as a highly effective treatment for intractable, debilitating essential tremor. However, since the intention tremor of essential tremor is typically intermittent, and commonly absent at rest, the currently available continuous deep brain stimulation may be delivering unnecessary current to the brain that increases undesirable side effects such as slurred speech and walking difficulty, and hastens the depletion of device batteries, necessitating more frequent surgical procedures to replace spent pulse generators. The overall objective of this early feasibility study is to provide preliminary data on the safety and efficacy of "closed-loop" deep brain stimulation for intention tremor using novel deep brain stimulation devices capable of continuously sensing brain activity and delivering therapeutic stimulation only when necessary to suppress tremor.

The primary purpose of this study is to evaluate the dose-response relationship of different doses of SAGE-324 on upper extremity tremor in participants with essential tremor (ET) in the monotherapy cohort.

The following trial evaluates the effect of Tremor Stabilization Algorithms on involuntary hand tremors suffered by Parkinson's patients. These algorithms will be implemented in Virtual Reality (VR). Approximately 300 study subjects are to be randomized to experimental (VR plus algorithms, i.e., intervention) and active comparator (VR only, i.e., control) study arms. Study subjects will perform a postural tremor test (PTT) to elicit postural parkinsonian tremors. Our primary outcome is whether the intervention modifies tremor severity.

The purpose of this research is to observe the daily loss of benefit from DBS therapy by performing a standardized set of tasks throughout the day while wearing an Apple Watch to collect movement and other physiological data.

Individuals experiencing tremors face difficulty performing activities of daily living caused by involuntary oscillation of the muscles in the hands and arms. Current solutions to help suppress tremors include medication, surgery, assistive devices and lifestyle change. However, each of these has a drawback of its own including cost and unwanted side effects. Aside from the solutions listed, it has been shown that functional electrical stimulation(FES) is a possible solution to help suppress tremor. Additionally, FES can be combined with different technologies including accelerometers, gyroscopes and motion capture to develop a closed loop system for tremor suppression. However, this has drawbacks including signal interference and the need for multiple sensor to fully classify the tremor. Ultrasound imaging solves some of these issues because it can provide a direct visualization of hand muscles that contribute to tremor. This study will focus on detecting characterizing and differentiating tremors from voluntary hand motion using ultrasound imaging. The results obtained from this study will help design FES-based tremor-suppression techniques in the future. This study will target both subjects with different tremor disorders and able bodied subjects.

The researchers will examine functional neural correlates that differentiate between laryngeal dystonia and voice tremor and contribute to disorder-specific pathophysiology using a cross-disciplinary approach of multimodal brain imaging.

The goals of this project are 1) to determine the incidence of neurological voice disorders in patients with dystonia and essential tremor undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS), 2) investigate the neuroimaging and intracranial neurophysiology correlates of voice dysfunction in these subjects, and subsequently 3) determine the effects of DBS on voice function.