Parietal proprioceptive loss with pseudoathetosis

Excerpt

Sirs: Pseudoathetosis is an athetoid-like movement disorder [6] caused by impaired processing of proprioceptive information (i.e. joint position and movement sense) to the striatum, which consequently fails to integrate sensory and motor inputs [8]. Any lesion along proprioceptive pathways from muscle spindles and joint receptors to primary somatosensory cortex (S1) may produce pseudoathetosis. Nevertheless, pseudoathetosis is most often seen in peripheral neuropathies and in dorsal root ganglia or dorsal column disorders [2]. Because of the close spatial relation of deep sensation fibres from peripheral nerves to brain stem level pseudoathetosis usually presents with combined proprioceptive and vibration sense impairment [3]. Here we report a patient who presented with pseudoathetosis due to characteristic proprioceptive loss. Unusually, this was not associated with an impairment of vibration sense leading to the rare diagnosis of parietal pseudoathetosis. …