Anticipatory grip force control in Parkinson's disease

The basal ganglia participate in anticipatory motor control. The particular role at the different levels of control – from reflexes to reward systems – is however unclear. Studies of grip forces during object manipulation in patients with Parkinson's disease provide mixed evidence: Grip forces successfully anticipated physical object properties in weight-lifting tasks, but multi-finger grasping tasks suggest impaired anticipation. To further explore this issue, we applied a paradigm that had revealed clear deficits of grip force anticipation in a recent study of patients with pure cerebellar diseases(*). Twenty…