The impact of lockdown on Functional Motor Disorders patients during the first COVID-19 outbreak: acase-control study

The impact of recurrent Covid-19 waves on patients with Functional Movement Disorders: A follow-up study

“…Mental fatigue was reported equally worsened (∼50%) at T1 vs T0. Anxiety and depression levels resulted comparable to T0, where they had been found increased only in HC [4] , [8] . Pain had worsened in comparison to HC at T0 and remained stable in comparison to T1 (reported worsened and unchanged in an equal number of patients, 42%).…”

“…This contrasts with the consistent negative impact on clinical status and the overall well-being of patients with other pre-existing movement disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease [11] , further highlighting the uniqueness of FMD pathophysiology and possibly implying a different role of stress in the natural history of this disorder. Importantly, in the framework of the biopsychosocial model, a diverted self-focused attention/monitoring toward the stressful global pandemic might have distracted patients and favored stability of symptoms [8] .…”

“…We enrolled 73 patients with an established diagnosis of FMDs based on the Gupta and Lang criteria [10] , regularly followed-up every three months at our specialized clinic in Verona, who had previously completed the first survey [8] . They were contacted via phone or mail and given the link for a semi-anonymous Survey and two weeks to complete it.…”

“…In May 2021, we asked FMDs patients to retrospectively rate the severity of MS, NMS, and GHS during the two previous months of March-April 2021 (while social restrictions were still quite severe in Italy) and their changes with respect to Summer 2020 (when social restrictions were relatively loose). We compared these results with those obtained from the first survey-based study [8] , conducted in October 2020. We will refer to the third wave as T1 and to the first wave as T0 ( Figure 1 ).…”

“…There have been three major repeated outbreaks and different measures to limit virus’ diffusion have been adopted ( Figure 1 ) [7] . We have recently published the results of a survey-based study on the impact of the first lockdown on our cohort of FMDs patients [8] . We found mild to moderate MS reports in the majority of patients, and levels of NMS comparable to healthy controls (HC).…”