Objective: The link between handedness and the prevalence of musician’s dystonia has not been investigated yet. In this review potential differences in handedness distribution between the population of musician’s dystonia patients and healthy musicians were studied.

Background: Musician’s dystonia often leads to the end of the professional career. In focal task-specific dystonia, both brain hemispheres are affected, but right-handers and males show a stronger motor lateralisation than left-handers and females. The hypothesis that left-handedness is less common among musician’s dystonia patients than among healthy musicians was tested.

Method: A systematic literature search on the medical database PubMed was performed and resulted in 1159 articles on focal hand dystonia. The articles were screened using Covidence and evaluated by two independent investigators. Studies containing original data on musician’s dystonia were included, and epidemiological data (handedness, gender, age of onset, affected hand) was extracted. Chi-square-goodness-of-fit tests and cross tabulations were conducted in the statistical analysis to compare the patient population with healthy musicians.

Results: 762 patients with musician’s dystonia were extracted from 90 articles, 698 (91,6%) right-handed and 64 (8,4%) non-right handed patients were compared with 87,8% right-handed and 12,2% non-right handed healthy musicians (X²=10,28 df=1; p <0,01). The mean age of disease onset was 35±10 years, and the gender distribution indicated a clear majority of male patients with 534 (74,3%) compared to 185 female patients (25,7%).

Conclusion: Our findings reveal a deviant distribution of handedness comparing the population of musician’s dystonia patients with healthy musicians. This result can be seen as an indication of right-handedness being a promoting factor for the development of a musician’s dystonia. This finding might be related to the known stronger lateralisation of motor functions in right-handers. This notion is also in line with the observed unequal gender distribution as a stronger lateralisation of brain functions is known for males compared to females.

This work was previously presented at the DGN-Congress in Berlin, Germany in November 2022.

« Back to 2023 International Congress

MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/the-link-between-handedness-and-prevalence-of-musicians-dystonia-a-systematic-literature-review/