Paratonía: un signo relevante en neuropsiquiatría

Paratonia is motor tone disturbance, of interest in neuropsychiatry due to its involvement in the semiology of dementia and catatonia. In paratonia, resistance to passive manipulation is erratic and depends on the intensity of the imposed movement. It is usually divided into an oppositional subtype (gegenhalten) and a facilitatory subtype (mitgehen). Efforts have been made in the field of dementia to establish a consensus definition of paratonia and to describe different exploratory manoeuvres. This contrasts with the conceptual ambiguity and heterogeneity found in the psychiatric literature regarding this term, which still appears in multiple scales and diagnostic criteria for catatonia. This is a problem given the general difficulties in defining and operationalising the characteristic signs of catatonia and in the creation of universally accepted assessment instruments. This article provides a review of scientific literature on paratonia to describe this problem, and encourage advances made in its research by other fields that could serve as a reference for its study in psychiatry.