bioRxiv Science⌕ Search
Home/Archive/bioRxiv

bioRxiv · 10.1101/2024.09.02.610624

Lower-Limb Muscle Synergies in Musician's Dystonia: A Case Study of a Drummer

Sata, S.·Honda, K.·Yamaguchi, S.·Komine, M.·Kim, S.·Kashino, M.·Hagio, S.·Fujii, S.
View original source ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Musicians dystonia (MD) is a movement disorder characterized by involuntary muscle contractions specifically triggered by playing an instrument. This condition often leads to a loss of fine motor control, threatening the careers of affected musicians. While MD is commonly associated with the hands, it can also affect the lower limbs, particularly in drummers. Understanding the muscle coordination involved in MD is crucial for comprehending its neurological mechanisms, yet the muscle coordination of lower-limb dystonia has not been thoroughly explored. This study aimed to investigate the differences in lower-limb muscle synergies in a drummer with MD, utilizing Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) to analyze coordinated muscle activity patterns during drumming tasks. A 36-year-old male professional drummer with lower-limb MD was instructed to play a drum set in time with a metronome set at 80 beats per minute. The task involved striking the bass drum pedal in time with the downbeat. Electromyographic (EMG) data were collected from ten muscles in the right lower limb. The data were analyzed using NMF to extract muscle synergies and compare the number of synergies, spatial modules, and temporal modules between the data with and without dystonia symptoms. The number of muscle synergies did not differ significantly between the data with and without symptoms. Notably, changes were observed in both the spatial and temporal modules of muscle synergies. Spatial modules revealed the appearance of dystonia-specific muscle synergy, which is considered related to compensatory movement. Temporal modules showed significant earlier overactivation in timing, which is considered the direct manifestation of dystonia symptoms. These findings indicate that lower-limb dystonia in drummers affects the spatial and temporal profiles of muscle synergies. This study underscores the importance of considering both spatial and temporal modules of muscle synergy in understanding and treating lower-limb dystonia in drummers. Further research is needed to validate these findings and apply muscle synergy analysis for the clinical assessment of lower-limb dystonia in drummers.

Source connections

Explore related subjects

neurosciencePreprint

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Sata, S., Honda, K., Yamaguchi, S., Komine, M., Kim, S., Kashino, M., Hagio, S., Fujii, S.. 2024-09-03. Lower-Limb Muscle Synergies in Musician's Dystonia: A Case Study of a Drummer. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.02.610624

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related preprints

bioRxiv2026

Attention Across Scales: From Individual Variation to Social Hierarchies and Brain Networks in Semi-Free-Ranging Macaques

Attention is a fundamental brain function supporting perception, decision-making, and social behavior, and its dysfunction profoundly impairs daily life. It is both dynamic and stable, varying across observations and individuals, changing across the lifespan, and being shaped by social and environmental experience. Yet capturing this complexity remains a central challenge in neuroscience. Here, we integrated longitudinal behavioral assessments of semi-free-ranging macaques living in naturalistic social groups with resting-state fMRI. We quantified performance across days, ages, and social hierarchies and related it to intrinsic brain organization. Distinct attentional phenotypes emerged, including individuals with reduced attentional control. Performance followed an inverted-U lifespan trajectory, improving from childhood to adulthood before declining. Social status modulated attentional performance. Critically, nonlinear lifespan trajectories and associations with individual attentional differences were most clearly expressed in frontoparietal connectivity. Together, these findings reveal how sustained attention is organized across scales, providing a biological framework for its individual diversity, social modulation, and neural basis.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

Decoding natural scenes from patterned optogenetic responses in mouse visual cortex

A central challenge in developing visual cortical prostheses is to determine how visual stimuli should be transformed into effective patterns of cortical stimulation. Although advances in stimulation technologies, including optogenetics, provide increasingly precise control over cortical activity, it remains unclear whether artificially evoked activity can reproduce the information content of naturally evoked visual representations. Here we establish a quantitative framework for evaluating visual encoding strategies by decoding cortical responses evoked by natural vision and patterned optogenetic stimulation. We developed a novel dual-modal paradigm in awake mice to bridge the gap between endogenous photostimulation and artificial network driving. By co-expressing the high-performance calcium indicator GCaMP6s and the red-shifted, ultra-sensitive opsin rsChRmine-oScarlet in the primary visual cortex (V1), we successfully translated dynamic natural movie frames into patterned, spatiotemporal optogenetic stimulation. Quantitative comparisons of macro-scale dynamics demonstrated that this patterned optogenetic injection evokes cortical states highly comparable and representationally aligned with those driven by actual visual photostimulation. To systematically evaluate the fidelity of these responses, we developed STAR, a deep learning model featuring spatial and temporal attention mechanisms, and successfully reconstructed the frames of natural movies from V1 signals under both experimental modalities. Collectively, our results demonstrate that complex sensory information can be both naturally encoded and synthetically injected into V1 circuits with high decoding fidelity. This work provides an empirical and computational proof-of-concept for intelligent, closed-loop biomimetic encoders, establishing a robust framework for next-generation cortical visual neuroprostheses and bidirectional brain-machine interfaces.

neuroscience↗
bioRxiv2026

Why Is Spontaneous Blink Timing Informative? An Adaptive Scheduling Perspective

Spontaneous eye blinks have long been linked to cognitive processing, yet how task demands shape blink timing and its relationship to behavioral performance remains unclear. We examined spontaneous blink behavior in 576 adults performing two variants of the Continuous Performance Task (CPT). Blink occurrence and timing were most strongly modulated by the experimental condition in the more demanding CPT-AX task, whereas their association with response time was stronger in the CPT-X task, where more consistent blink timing predicted faster responses. This dissociation suggests that task structure changes not only blink behavior but also the behavioral relevance of blink timing. These findings are consistent with an adaptive scheduling account of spontaneous blinking and provide a conceptual framework for understanding when and why blink timing contains chronometric information about ongoing cognition.

neuroscience↗