Spasticity
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Clinic
- Spasticity is characterized by Muscular Hypertonia / Muscle-stiffness
- It might interfere with Movement / Speech or Discomfort / Pain
- Along with Hyper reflexia and Clonus, it is a part of UMN entity.
- It is often used interchangeably with hypertonia.
- It is dependent on the Muscle speed and range of motion and manifests itself when the muscle contracts at high speed. This means that when the speed and amplitude of contraction exceeds the threshold, Spasticity occurs
Diagnostic Characters
- Asymmetric: Because it involves the antagonist muscles
- Velocity-dependent: It increases tonic stretch reflexes and tendon jerks, resulting from hyper-excitability of the stretch reflex
- Strength dependent: Increasing the strength of muscle stretch reflex causes the muscle to contract with greater intensity and power in response to stretching, and this contraction has a direct relationship with the strength of stretching. In this condition, spasticity is occurred.
Analogues
Spasticity has two analogues:
- Rigidity: Spasticity is Velocity-dependent but rigidity is not
- Spasm: It is necessarily painful opposite to Spasticity. Also Spasticity has them of paralysis opposite to Spasm
Related entities
- Clonus
- Fasciculation
- Myoclonus
- Twitching
- Rigidity