Dystonia is a movement disorder of yet unknown causes and pathophysiology. It is characterized by sustained or intermittent muscle contractions causing abnormal, often repetitive, movements, postures, or both.

Focal dystonias are the most common forms of dystonia and can affect different muscle groups (e.g., cervical dystonia, focal hand dystonia, laryngeal dystonia, blepharospasm). The treatment of this disorder is currently limited to symptom management, typically, with botulinum toxin injections into the affected muscles.

Our long-term goal is to identify the neural mechanisms underlying the pathophysiology of focal dystonia and to develop new strategies for enhanced clinical management of this disorder, including its accurate diagnosis, prediction in persons at-risk, and novel therapeutic strategies.

We use a variety of neuroimaging methodologies, including functional MRI (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) for mapping of brain functional activity and networks, pharmacological fMRI (phfMRI) for the assessment of drug effects on brain function, high-resolution structural MRI and diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) with tractography for evaluation of brain structural organization, and positron emission tomography (PET) with radiolabeled ligands for neuroreceptor mapping.