Authors: Alexander Lehn George Mellick Richard Boyle
Publish Date: 2014/01/22
Volume: 261, Issue: 4, Pages: 668-674
Abstract
Idiopathicisolated focal dystonia IIFD is a movement disorder characterised by involuntary sustained muscle contractions leading to abnormal postures Psychopathology is frequent in patients with IIFD and while traditionally this was thought to be a secondary phenomenon there is emerging evidence for shared neurobiological mechanisms We conducted a singlecentre crosssectional study of 103 consecutive patients with IIFD and two comparison groups 78 consecutive patients with hemifacial spasm HFS and 93 healthy control subjects Assessments with regard to psychiatric disturbances were performed using selfreport questionnaires including the selfreport version of the Yale–Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale YBOCSSR the Beck Anxiety Inventory BAI and the Beck Depression Inventory BDI Compared to healthy control subjects and patients with HFS the IIFD group had higher OCS anxiety and depression scores as measured by the YBOCSSR BAI and BDI respectively The YBOCSSR BAI and BDI were highly correlated across all the subjects Logistic regression analysis showed that the main driver of high obsessive–compulsive symptom scores irrespective of neurological diagnosis was the BDI whereas it was BAI and not BDI that drives the association between the psychiatric rating scale scores and the neurological diagnosis Our findings suggest that while clinically significant obsessive–compulsive symptoms are overrepresented in IIFD patients relative to controls the BAI may have better discriminatory power to distinguish between the psychiatric symptoms in IIFD patients
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