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Essential tremor is a common neurological condition that results in uncontrollable tremors when moving or actively maintaining a posture. It is not a serious illness, but it can be a handicap. There is no specific treatment to completely suppress essential tremor.

What is essential tremor?

Essential tremor is a common neurological condition that results in uncontrollable tremors when moving or actively maintaining a posture. Unknown to the general public, this disease can cause social handicap and stigmatization of those affected. About 10% of people affected by this disease, suffer from forms severe enough to constitute a handicap in daily life.

While the vast majority of these people are over 50 (5% of those over 65 suffer from it), around 16,000 people under 40 also suffer from it. In this population, tremor is legally considered a so-called “rare” disease.

What are the essential tremor symptoms?

Essential tremors are triggered when the person maintains a posture that is not a resting posture. Essential tremor can affect the hands, jaws, chin, head and neck, more rarely the trunk. It rarely affects the legs. When essential tremor affects the vocal cords, the voice becomes quavery. Essential tremor affects the right and left sides of the body, but not necessarily with the same severity. It is not a serious disease, but it represents a handicap.

The symptoms essential tremor may appear in children and adolescents (rare form). In this case, these symptoms stabilize in adulthood and begin to slowly worsen again after age 50. In the vast majority of cases, essential tremor begins gradually after age 55 and continues to progress slowly throughout old age.

What are the complications of essential tremor?

Essential tremor does not cause death or paralysis, but it is a physical disability in 25% of patients (the disease forces the person to change jobs or renders them unfit for work or independent living). In the other patients, the handicap is rather social. Indeed, in the minds of ill-informed people, tremors evoke other illnesses: alco**holism, psychiatric illness, Parkinson disease, etc. People suffering from essential tremor must then explain, justify themselves and their quality of life suffers.