What are the signs of muscle spasticity?

Symptoms

  • Muscle stiffness, causing movements to be less precise and making certain tasks difficult to perform.
  • Muscle spasms, causing uncontrollable and often painful muscle contractions.
  • Involuntary crossing of the legs.
  • Muscle and joint deformities.
  • Muscle fatigue.
  • Inhibition of longitudinal muscle growth.

Why do UMN lesions cause spasticity?

How does UMN lesion cause spasticity and associated phenomena? The major problem is a loss of control of the spinal reflexes. Spinal reflex activity is normally tightly regulated and if inhibitory control is lost, the balance is tipped in favor of excitation, resulting in hyperexcitability of the spinal reflexes.

What causes spastic hypertonia?

What causes hypertonia? A communication error in your central nervous system (brain and spinal cord), which regulates how nerves and muscles interact, causes hypertonia.

What does spasticity in legs feel like?

Spasticity may be as mild as the feeling of tightness of muscles or may be so severe as to produce painful, uncontrollable spasms of extremities, usually of the legs. Spasticity may also produce feelings of pain or tightness in and around joints, and can cause low back pain.

What are the signs of an upper motor neuron lesion?

Symptoms

  • Muscle weakness. The weakness can range from mild to severe.
  • Overactive reflexes. Your muscles tense when they shouldn’t.
  • Tight muscles. The muscles become rigid and hard to move.
  • Clonus. This is muscular spasm that involve repeated, often rhythmic, contractions.
  • The Babinski response.

What are upper motor neuron signs?

Upper motor neuron syndrome refers to a combination of resulting symptoms such as muscle weakness, decreased muscle control, easy fatigability, altered muscle tone and exaggerated deep tendon reflexes (also known as spasticity), all of which can occur after a brain or spinal cord injury.

What does hypertonia feel like?

Hypertonia is when someone has too much muscle tone in their body, making it hard to flex and move around normally. People with hypertonia will have issues with stiff movements, balance, walking and reaching. In some cases, someone can also have problems with feeding.

What is the difference between hypertonia and spasticity?

Hypertonia is resistance to passive movement, it is not dependent on velocity, can be with or without spasticity. Spasticity is an increase in resistance to sudden , passive movement and IS velocity dependent. The faster the passive movement the stronger the resistance.