The number of sufferers from cerebral palsy in Japan has been estimated to be somewhere between 200, 000 and 300, 000. Dysarthria, among others, occurs frequently in this disease, the incidence being 70 to 90 per cent according to most statistics. For the treatment of dysarthria, speech therapy has been attempted for more than 20 years throughout the world, and has gained increasing attention. Nevertheless, systematic study of dysarthria has been infrequent. A series have already been studied of patients aged 5 to 15 with various types of dysarthria, in terms of general clinical findings, intelligence quotient, vital capacity of the lung, movement of the diaphragm as determined with the double exposure technique and their relationship to dysarthria. This communication is concerned with the result of our further study on the minor tremor (MT) of the body surface, in 13 cases from the same series. Since 1946, Rohracher has reported on the phenomenon of surface vibration which is of an amplitude of a few micra with certain frequencies of cycle. This has been called “Mikroschwingung” or “Mikrovibration.” A number of papers have been published by his group which includes Marko. This phenomenon was first confirmed in Japan in 1953 by Inanaga and Sugano who proposed the term “minor tremor” (MT) for this type of vibration. Rohracher studied the relationship of MT to psyche, temperature regulation and muscle tone, while Sugano, Inanaga and Kurita and others reported on the effects of various drugs on MT. It is now generally thought that muscle tone is the most likely force which originates MT and that the tremor is in some way related to the maintenance of the body temperature. The present investigation, based on the established fact that MT represents the state of muscle tone and is influenced by the psychic state, aims at elucidating the pattern of MT in cerebral palsy.
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