It can be assumed that the activation in the brain that occurs when observing instrumental playing and imagining playing one's own instrument may also show corresponding changes in those affected by musician's dystonia and should therefore provide us with clues as to what happens differently in the planning and execution of the affected movement than in healthy musicians. This is exactly what we want to investigate. To do this, the test subjects will be asked to watch videos of someone playing their instrument and then imagine playing their instrument while they lie in the MRI scanner and we record the brain activity.

An MRI measurement has the advantage of providing us with a lot of information without exposing the test subjects to radiation.

We are looking for pianists with musician's dystonia for this study - this has the background that we can establish a high degree of comparability by restricting ourselves to this instrumental group, which is an advantage in the evaluation.

We are also looking for healthy pianists as a comparison group.

The study is being conducted in cooperation between the IMMM and Hanover Medical School (MHH); the contact persons are Prof. Dr. Lee, head of the IMMM, and Dr. med. Johanna Doll-Lee from the MHH's Department of Neurology (doll-lee.johanna@mh-hannover.de).This study is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

For further details and questions please contact us!

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