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What is Essential Tremor?
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What is Essential Tremor? | |||
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Essential tremor is a very common but complex neurologic movement disorder. It's called "essential" because in the past, it had no known cause. It's not caused by another neurological condition or the side effect of a medication. ET usually affects the hands, but it may also affect the head and neck (causing shaking), face, jaw, tongue, voice (causing a shaking or quivering sound), the trunk and, rarely, the legs and feet. The tremor may be a rhythmic "back-and-forth" or "to-and-fro" movement produced by involuntary (unintentional) contractions of the muscle. Severity of the tremors can vary greatly from hour to hour and day to day.
Some people experience tremor only in certain positions – this is called postural tremor. Tremor that worsens while writing or eating is called kinetic or action-specific tremor. Most people with ET have both postural and kinetic tremor. |
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Who gets ET? | |||
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As many as 1 in 20 people older than age 40 and 1 in 5 people over 65 may have ET. There may be more than 5 million people with ET in the United States, and many more worldwide. Essential tremor is much more common than most neurologic disease, with the exception of stroke, and is more common than Parkinson's disease – a disorder characterized by resting tremor, stiffness and slowness of movement. | |||
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