Browsing by Author "Välimaa, Neena"

Background Myoclonic twitches are bursts of jerky movements of the distal limbs that occur during REM-sleep (1). An earlier study conducted by Sokoloff et al. in 2020 hypothesized that myoclonic twitches could offer a crucial insight into the developmental status of a human infant’s nervous system (1). They assessed the patterning and the rate of twitching in 16 in term infants. Our study aimed to test whether the earlier conducted study and its findings could be repeated on a bigger scale. Materials & Methods The data for this study was collected from HUS (Helsinki University Hospital) Children’s Hospital’s Video-EEGs by collecting the data of all under one-year-old children that had been referred to video-EEG examinations between 9th May, 2019 - 20th May, 2020 and had their limbs visible whilst sleeping (133 sessions from 92 infants). The data was collected with the help of an EEG reader program named NicOne Reader by one annotator over the summer of 2020. The annotations were done with the accuracy of left foot, left hand, right foot, right hand and head. The median recording duration was 19.0 min (IQR: 13.58 to 27.24 min)(Range: from 1.5 to 210.5 min) and the average recording duration was 25.5 min. Results Our results showed that both the twitch frequency and the proportion of hand and feet clusters from all clusters grew in relation to age. In addition, twitching in the hands and the feet occurred much more often than twitching of the head or the face. Conclusions Like in Blomberg’s group’s study (1) our findings give promise that myoclonic twitching can be used to evaluate sensorimotor development in the future. Further studies are needed in order to form a universal database regarding myoclonic twitching and its relation to typical and atypical sensorimotor development.