Essential Tremor (ET), one of the most common movement disorders, is estimated to affect nearly 7 million individuals in the USA. Generally, ET patients present with “involuntary, rhythmic, oscillatory movements of a body part in motion (action tremor)”. Facts about Essential Tremor from the International Essential Tremor Foundation (IETF) are given here

Recently, in a paper published in JAMA NETWORK, W. Jeffrey Elias, MD, Department of Neurological Surgery and Binit B. Shah, MD,Department of Neurology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, cautioned that prevalence of ET is likely underestimated because epidemiologic studies have found that many patients do not seek medical evaluation of tremor.

Researchers have reviewed ET studies in 1998 and 2010. A more recent review by Elan D. Louis, MD, MS and Morgan McCreary, PhD Department of Neurology, University of Texas Southwestern, Dallas, USA (Tremor and other Hyperkinetic Movements on line 9 July 2021) covered prevalence of ET in population-based epidemiological studies since then and derived a precise summary estimate of prevalence of ET and examined differences in prevalence across studies. This review with 78 relevant references may probably be the most authentic and extensive.

These researchers highlighted the importance of such estimates because they form the numerical basis for public health initiatives and offer clues about underlying biological factors of mechanistic importance.

A comprehensive meta-analysis which covered 42 population-based prevalence studies of just over 540 000 individuals in 23 countries reported a pooled prevalence of ET of 1.33% among all age groups and a prevalence of 5.79% in individuals 65 years or older.

The analysis provided more........

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