A team of Canadian and American scientists has made a promising breakthrough in understanding the origins of a mysterious neurological disorder known as mirror movements. The discovery was made by Kaiyue Zhang, a doctoral student at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM), affiliated with Université de Montréal, and by Karina Chaudhari, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. As co-first authors, they published their study in the journal Science Signaling .
They were led by Frédéric Charron, an UdeM research professor and director of the IRCM's molecular biology of neuronal development research unit, in collaboration with Greg Bashaw's team at the University of Pennsylvania. Mirror movement disorder is a poorly understood hereditary neurological disorder that manifests itself in involuntary movements from an early age, mainly in the arms and hands. In those affected, the right hand involuntarily reproduces the movements of the left and vice versa.
The disorder can cause pain in the arms during prolonged activities, and difficulties in performing tasks requiring left-right coordination. "Mirror movement disorder disrupts the daily lives of affected individuals," said Charron, who's also an adjunct professor at McGill University. "Simple actions such as opening a bottle of water can become difficult, as can playing a musical instrument.
" A defect in a phenomenon The cellular mechanism behind mirror movements is a defect in a phenomenon known as axo.
