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Long-Term Treatment of Focal Dystonias (Cervical and Writer’s Cramp): Clinical and Quality of Life Impact

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Dystonia and Dystonic Syndromes

Abstract

Dystonias are a group of disorders with many different clinical manifestations but with certain common features. Affected patients share involuntary sustained or intermittent muscle contractions that cause abnormal postures and/or repetitive movements. The most common forms of adult-onset focal dystonias are cervical dystonia, blepharospasm, oromandibular dystonia, laryngeal dystonia, and limb dystonias such as writer’s cramp. In this chapter, we were interested in certain aspects of the long-term treatment of two focal dystonias, cervical dystonia and limb dystonia (writer’s cramp), with botulinum toxin A (BoNT-A).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic/the Ministry of Health Departmental Research and Development Programme III (2010–2015) NT/13437 and by the “CEITEC – Central European Institute of Technology” project (CZ.1.05/1.1.00/02.0068) from the European Regional Development Fund.

We wish to express our thanks to Ing. Zdenek Novotny for the statistical analysis and to Anne Johnson for grammatical assistance.

We would like to thank our colleagues who treated and followed some of the patients, Petr Kaňovský, Hana Klajblová, Dagmar Kubová, Eduard Minks, Igor Nestrašil, Jiří Pulkrábek, Irena Rektorová, Silvie Sedláčková, Martina Bočková, Hana Streitová, and Jiří Zicha; our nursing staff, Vlasta Dírerová, Anita Hlučková, Jana Bártová, and Petra Krainerová; and Ludmila Vápeníková, who helped with part of the patient database.

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Bareš, M., Baláž, M., Filip, P. (2015). Long-Term Treatment of Focal Dystonias (Cervical and Writer’s Cramp): Clinical and Quality of Life Impact. In: Kanovsky, P., Bhatia, K., Rosales, R. (eds) Dystonia and Dystonic Syndromes. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1516-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-1516-9_11

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