Agnosia for head tremor in essential tremor: prevalence and clinical correlates

BACKGROUND: Lack of awareness of involuntary movements is a curious phenomenon in patients with certain movement disorders. An interesting anecdotal observation is that patients with essential tremor (ET) often seem unaware of their own head tremor. In the current study, we asked ET patients whether they were aware of head tremor while it was occurring on examination, thereby allowing us to gauge real-time awareness of their involuntary movement. METHODS: ET cases enrolled in an ongoing clinical research study at the Columbia University Medical Center (2009–2014). During a videotaped tremor examination, they were questioned about the presence of head tremor. True positives were cases who exhibited head tremor on examination and were aware of it; false negatives were cases who exhibited head tremor but were unaware of it. RESULTS: The 126 ET cases had a mean age of 72.6 ± 12.4 years. Nineteen (48.7 %) of 39 cases with head tremor on examination did not report having head tremor at that moment. Even among cases with moderate or severe head tremor on examination, unawareness of head tremor was 45.5 %. We assessed the clinical correlates of unawareness of head tremor, comparing true positives to false negatives, and unawareness was correlated with older age, lower mental status test scores and several other clinical variables. CONCLUSIONS: Nearly one-half of ET cases with head tremor on examination were acutely unaware of their tremor. Whether such agnosia for tremor may be leveraged as a diagnostic feature of ET is a question for future clinical studies. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s40734-016-0032-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.