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Updated: May 21, 2026

MRI-guided Focused Ultrasound Thalamotomy for Patients with Medically-refractory Essential Tremor
Published on: December 13, 2017
Psychiatric disorders in patients with essential tremor
Giovanni Fabbrini1, Isabella Berardelli, Marika Falla
1Department of Neurology and Psychiatry, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
Background:
Previous studies have reported that a consistent proportion of patients with Essential Tremor may have psychiatric disorders but it is unclear whether these disorders are increased in frequency as compared to healthy subjects.
Methods:
In a case-control study, we adopted the structured interviews for DSM-IV, SCID-I and SCID-II, to investigate psychiatric and personality disorders in 37 ET patients and 34 healthy subjects. As cognitive changes in ET may be a confounding factor we enrolled patients and healthy control subjects without cognitive dysfunction.
Results:
SCID-I showed that Axis-I psychiatric disorders, mainly depressive disorders, were more frequent in ET patients (20 of 37; 54%) than in healthy subjects (8 of 34; 22%) (p < 0.01). Depressive disorders were more frequent in patients with a family history of ET (p < 0.05) in comparison to patients without a family history. SCID-II disclosed that the frequency of personality disorders was similar in patients with ET and healthy subjects.
Conclusion:
Psychiatric disorders may be associated to the neurological manifestations of ET.
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