A New Method to Evaluate Muscle Tone in the Upper Limb

Some neurological diseases can cause changes in muscle tone. These changes can occur after lesions of central motor pathways (spastic syndrome), in Parkinson syndrome (rigidity) and cerebellar hypotonia. Other syndromes with increased muscle tone are less well defined like the muscle stiffness in CRPS. The problem in clinical praxis is that there is only a limited set of evaluation methods mostly using scales, which are highly observer dependent thus limiting the possibility to do inter-rater comparisons. The pendulum test of Wartenberg is a semiautomatic method to evaluate the muscle tone of the lower limb. It…