Motor apraxia is a condition caused by damage to the brain that interferes with a person’s ability to plan and execute voluntary movements. It can affect different parts of the body, including limbs, mouth, and eyes, and can be caused by head trauma, stroke, or degenerative diseases. Ideomotor apraxia is a specific type that affects hand gestures and tool use, making it difficult for the sufferer to imitate or mimic actions when prompted to do so. It is usually caused by a brain injury, most commonly due to a stroke.
Motor apraxia is a condition that interferes with the sufferer’s ability to plan and execute voluntary movements with their body. This inability remains even when the sufferer understands how to perform the movement, wants to move, and has no physical injury or disability in the damaged body part that would prevent him from moving normally. It is caused by damage to the brain, a part of the brain involved in voluntary motor control.
There are different types of motor apraxia, with symptoms depending on the precise nature of the damage. It can affect areas of the body including the limbs, mouth and eye sockets. It reduces the ability to perform motor activities properly and in severe cases can interfere with a person’s ability to move to such an extent that they are unable to live independently. Common causes include head trauma, stroke, and degenerative diseases of the nervous system.
Motor apraxia is often distinguished from verbal apraxia, or speech apraxia, which affects a sufferer’s ability to speak by interfering with the movement of their mouth as they try to form words. While verbal and motor apraxia are both caused by damage to the motor centers of the brain and often occur together, the latter term is commonly used to refer specifically to non-speech impairments of voluntary motor control. Bruns ataxia, a disorder that interferes with walking due to lack of muscle coordination, is sometimes called gait apraxia, but it’s actually an unrelated condition.
Different types of apraxia are defined based on the part of the body they affect. Kinetic limb apraxia interferes with a person’s ability to make precise movements with the arms, legs, and fingers. This can affect both gross motor skills, such as walking, and fine movements, such as the ability to button a shirt or tie knots.
Buccofacial apraxia affects voluntary facial movements, such as blinking. Ocular motor apraxia interferes with eye movements and the ability to move the eyes rapidly, making it difficult for the sufferer to follow moving objects or control the direction in which they look without turning their whole head. Oral motor apraxia interferes with nonverbal oral movements, such as chewing. This is a distinct condition from verbal apraxia, and while they often occur together, it is possible to have one and not the other.
Ideomotor apraxia is a form of motor apraxia that interferes with hand gestures and tool use, and especially with the ability to imitate or mimic these actions when prompted to do so. For example, if a patient with motor apraxia is given a toothbrush and told to pretend to use it or shown a gesture and told to imitate it, his or her ability to do so accurately will be impaired. In many people with ideomotor apraxia, their ability to spontaneously perform these tasks on their own initiative is intact.
For example, a sufferer may be able to raise their arm to get the attention of a waiter in a restaurant or hold and use a toothbrush normally while brushing their teeth, but lose the ability to do so when asked to raise your arm or pretend to get your teeth brushed by someone else. The disorder can take forms such as awkward or imprecise movements, slowness, or the inability to hold an object correctly. Someone with ideomotor apraxia may even attempt to perform a different, inappropriate task. For example, a person may respond to instructions to mimic brushing their teeth by attempting to use a toothbrush to comb their hair or write as if with a pen. Despite what this may seem to suggest, the problem is not caused by an inability to understand instructions, but by the inability of the nervous system to transform conscious intent into specific muscular movements.
Many sufferers are severely impaired in their ability to use their hands to operate tools or make gestures, even when acting spontaneously, and people who are significantly impaired only when acting on instructions may still suffer from minor deficits in some aspects of spontaneous motor control . Ideomotor apraxia is usually the result of a brain injury caused by an interruption in the blood supply or ischemia, most commonly due to a stroke. Lesions in many areas have been observed in several patients with ideomotor apraxia, with the premotor and parietal areas of the left hemisphere being the most common. Ideomotor apraxia can also have other causes, such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and other degenerative disorders of the nervous system.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
