Patients with Tremors Suffering from Parkinson’s Disease: Internal and External Focus of Attention

Patients with Tremors Suffering from Parkinson’s Disease:

Internal and External Focus of Attention

Neurological physical therapy has a potential to mitigate the effects of Parkinson’s disease (PD) on people suffering from this serious neurodegenerative disorder that has no cure. It has long been appreciated that a focus of attention may play an important role in ameliorating lives of patients suffering from PD because alleviating motor-system problems stills remains a burning issue. Thus, studies reveal that an external focus of attention reduces struggles of patients with postural instability and overall enhances mastery of task performance (Chiviacowsky et al., 2012; Wulf et al., 2009). Other researchers agree that external cues tend to direct experimental subjects with PD to make effective movements, while they have difficulties with internally cued behavior (Ho et al., 2014). Numerous studies prove that rehabilitation of patients with PD benefits from instructions that employ an external focus of attention (Kakar et al., 2013), while auditory cues prove to be the most effective way of treating PD patients in physiotherapy (Son and Kim, 2015), while generally external rhythmical cues, such as auditory, visual, and somatosensory ones, have a power to improve abilities of PD sufferers learning new motor skills (Rochester et al., 2010). Since tremors are a serious symptom for many patients due to the variability of tremor (Zach et al., 2015), and most researches focus on the idea that an external focus of attention influences positively only the gait and posture of PD patients, there is a critical need to explore the performance of grabbing tasks when an internal and external focus of attention is employed separately.

The long-term goal is to create grounds for amelioration of physiotherapy in respect of grabbing tasks for PD patients with tremors. This goal is supported by the findings of a study conducted by Tomlinson et al. (2012) that indicates that most...