Active clinical trials for "Dystonic Disorders"

The researchers will develop and evaluate the use of adaptive closed-loop brain-computer interface therapeutic intervention in laryngeal dystonia.

To study whether Heart Rate Variability (HRV) biofeedback training can improve abnormal head posture and painful symptomatology in patients with "cervical dystonia" not selected for DBS after extensive screening in a specialized unit but diagnosed " dysfunctional ". Patients of the respiratory coherence group will receive HRV biofeedback training for 12 sessions during a 6 months-period. The hypothesis is that this kind of physiological noninvasive therapy increasing coherence respiratory, will reduce pain and patient's complain about their psychogenic abnormal head posture. Improvement of anxiety, depression and quality of life are expected.

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.

The first line of therapy for cervical dystonia patients is botulinum toxin injections, however injection parameter determination and optimization are challenging for physicians to do. In addition, some patients receiving this treatment long-term experience short duration of relief. Thus, Dysport (Ipsen Biopharmaceuticals), another BoNT-A formulation, may increase the duration of clinical benefit. The objective of this study is to compare the wearing off time of their original BoNT-A formulation (same injection parameters for at least 3 cycles) and the optimized treatment of Dysport (after 2 injection cycles). Ideally, the clinical benefits should last 2.5 - 3 months as injections are administered every 3 months. Conversion to Dysport will be conducted and optimization of Dysport dosing will be done using our sensor-technology assessment. It is unclear whether there are differences in the neurophysiological effects between BoNT-A formulations, such as blocking spinal afferent signals from proprioceptive mechanoreceptors of the injected muscles contributing to CD or the modulation of cortical activity [8]. The underlying pathophysiology of impaired motor control in CD is theorized to be caused by abnormal somatosensory processing that affects proprioceptive and tactile function [8]. By altering the processing of proprioceptive signals from the muscles to the cortical somatosensory-motor areas, proprioceptive perception can be modulated and possibly normalize activity of the somatosensory-motor areas in CD. Thus, it is hypothesized that BoNT-A may indirectly modulate these cortical pathways and Dysport may have a longer modulatory effect to produce a longer lasting clinical response.

This research involves retrospective and prospective studies for clinical validation of a DystoniaNet deep learning platform for the diagnosis of isolated dystonia.

This is an exploratory pilot study to identify neural correlates of specific motor signs in Parkinson's disease (PD) and dystonia, using a novel totally implanted neural interface that senses brain activity as well as delivering therapeutic stimulation. Parkinson's disease and isolated dystonia patients will be implanted unilaterally or bilaterally with a totally internalized bidirectional neural interface, Medtronic Summit RC+S. This study includes three populations: ten PD patients undergoing deep brain stimulation in the subthalamic nucleus (STN), ten PD patients with a globus pallidus (GPi) target and five dystonia patients. All groups will test a variety of strategies for feedback-controlled deep brain stimulation, and all patients will undergo a blinded, small pilot clinical trial of closed-loop stimulation for thirty days.

Dystonia is involuntary movements characterized by posture abnormalities or repetitive movements as a result of continuous or intermittent simultaneous contraction of opposing muscle groups. Dystonic movements are twisted and twisted in a certain pattern. Dystonia is named in different ways according to its distribution in the body. Cervical dystonia is the most common form of regional dystonia and can be defined as involuntary movements of the head in normal upright posture.Cervical dystonia has different names according to the posture of the neck (torticollis, laterocollis, anterocollis and retrocollis). These different postures can be seen individually as well as together.Pain in cervical dystonia is seen in approximately 70% of patients, and this condition is closely related to involuntary contractions of neck muscles and neck posture disorder. Fatigue, anxiety, unhappiness, decreased self-efficacy and limitation in daily living activities due to decreased neck movements are the main causes of disability in patients with cervical dystonia. The first-line treatment of cervical dystonia consists of injecting botulinum toxin type A into the relevant muscles to alleviate these complaints.There is increasing evidence that range of motion, stretching, and relaxation exercises, in addition to botulinum toxin therapy, have beneficial effects on pain and disability in patients with cervical dystonia.In this study, patients with cervical dystonia who received botulinum toxin type A injection will be divided into study group and control group.The patients in the study group will be given stretching, strengthening, breathing and rhythmic coordination exercises for the muscles involved. (Personalized exercise program) In the control group, only breathing and rhythmic coordination exercises will be given and the two groups will be compared.Thus, it is aimed to investigate the effect of a personalized exercise program on clinical findings and the patient's quality of life.

The purpose of this study is to (1) investigate the effect of known dystonia-causing mutations on brain structure and function, to (2) identify structural brain changes that differ between clinical phenotypes of dystonia, and to (3) collect DNA, detailed family history, and clinical phenotypes from patients with idiopathic dystonia with the goal of identifying new dystonia-related genes. Investigators will be recruiting both healthy control subjects and subjects with any form of dystonia. For this study there will be a maximum of two study visit involving a clinical assessment, collection of medical and family history, task training session, an MRI using the learned tasks, and finally a blood draw for genetic analysis. In total, these visits will take 3-5 hours. If the dystonia subjects receive botulinum toxin injections for treatment, the participants and their matched controls will be asked to come for a second visit.

Cervical dystonia (CD), also known as spasmodic torticollis, is a type of focal dystonia, mainly manifesting as involuntary head turning or tilting, or holding a twisted posture. Although it can be alleviated by injection of botulinum toxin, the effect is temporary so that patients require multiple injections. Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) targeting on globus pallidus internus (GPi) or subthalamic nucleus (STN) has been proved to be a safe and effective strategy for primary cervical dystonia, even for those medically refractory cases. However, the question of which target is better has not been clarified. Therefore, the invstigators design this randomized and controlled trial, aiming to compare the differences between GPi-DBS and STN-DBS for cervical dystonia in the improvement of symptoms , quality of life, mental status, cognitive status, as well as in stimulation parameters and adverse effects. The invstigators hypothesize that STN-DBS will outperform GPi-DBS at short-term follow-up, while the superiority will disappear and the efficacy of the two group will become similar at long-term follow-up.