Dystonia and tremor: Do they have a shared biology?

Abstract

Dystonia and tremor are the two most commonly encountered hyperkinetic movement disorders encountered in clinical practice. While there has been substantial progress in the research on these two disorders, there also exists a lot of gray areas. Entities such as dystonic tremor and tremor associated with dystonia occupy a major portion of the "gray zone". In addition, there is a marked clinical heterogeneity and overlap of several clinical and epidemiological features among dystonia and tremor. These facts raise the possibility that dystonia and tremor could be having shared biology. In this chapter, we revisit critical aspects of this possibility that may have important clinical and research implications in the future. We comprehensively review the points in favor and against the theory that dystonia and tremor have shared biology from clinical, epidemiological, genetic and neuroimaging studies.