REM-Sleep Behavior Disorder in Patients With Essential Tremor: What Is Its Clinical Significance?

Conclusions: This study improves the knowledge on clinical significance of RBD symptoms in ET patients. Our preliminary findings demonstrate that presence of RBD in ET is associated with neurocognitive impairment, but not with cardiac autonomic dysfunction. Further longitudinal studies are needed to investigate whether ET patients with RBD will develop a frank dementia over the time. Introduction Essential tremor (ET) is one of the most common neurological disease among adults. Traditionally, it is defined by a core of clinical motor symptoms characterized by kinetic/postural tremor affecting hand, head, or other parts of the body without other clinical signs of parkinsonism (1). ET, however, is a phenotypically heterogeneous disease including both motor and non-motor symptoms (NMS). In recent years, a growing body of literature has been focused on the prevalence of some of the NMS in ET, such as cognitive impairment, depression, olfactory deficits and sleep disturbances as REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) (2). Among the NMS, depression and RBD are reported to have higher prevalence in ET patients than in the general population (3). Interestingly, the NMS especially RBD, found in patients with ET are known to be prodromal conversion symptoms of α-Synuclepathaties such as Parkinson's Disease (PD). However, the presence of RBD in PD patients identifies a specific clinical subtype of the disease. Indeed, in PD, RBD is associated with older age, longer dis...
Source: Frontiers in Neurology - Category: Neurology Source Type: research