Public Knowledge and Attitude toward Essential Tremor: A Questionnaire Survey

BACKGROUND: Public awareness of and attitude toward disease is an important issue for patients. Public awareness of essential tremor (ET) has never been studied. METHODS: We administered a 10-min, 31-item questionnaire to 250 consecutive enrollees. These included three samples carefully chosen to have a potential range of awareness of ET: 100 individuals ascertained from a vascular disease clinic, 100 individuals from a general neurology clinic, and 50 Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. RESULTS: Leaving aside PD patients, only 10–15% of enrollees had ever heard of or read about “ET.” Even among PD patients, only 32.7% had ever heard of or read about ET. After providing enrollees with three synonymous terms for ET (“benign tremor,” “kinetic tremor,” “familial tremor”), ~40% of non-PD enrollees and 51.0% with PD had ever heard or read about the condition. Even among participants who had heard of ET, ~10% did not know what the main symptom was, 1/3 were either unsure or thought ET was the same disease as PD, 1/4 thought that ET was the same condition as frailty- or aging-associated tremor, 2/3 attributed it to odd causes (e.g., trauma or alcohol abuse), only 1/3 knew of the existence of therapeutic brain surgery, fewer than 1/2 knew that children could have ET, and 3/4 did not know of a celebrity or historical figure with ET. Hence, lack of knowledge and misconceptions were common. CONCLUSION: Public knowledge of the existence and features of ET is overall poor. Greater awareness is important for the ET community.