Rehabilitation interventions for impaired handwriting in people with Parkinson’s disease: a protocol for a scoping review

Handwriting abnormalities in people with Parkinson’s disease include several dynamic and kinematic features such as increased writing stroke duration, reduced velocity and altered fluency of the writing strokes. “Dysgraphia” is a term that includes all the possible handwriting alterations and the “micrographia”, that defines an impairment of a fine motor skill manifesting mainly as a progressive or stable reduction in amplitude during a writing task, is only one of the characteristics of parkinsonian handwriting. Few studies investigated the effects of a rehabilitative training on handwriting or used measures of handwriting as an outcome in people with PD.

We aim to conduct a scoping review to answer the following question: “ What are the effects of a rehabilitative program on handwriting in people with PD ?”