Crossword-Solution: MYOCLONUS 9 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 16

For several years there has been, more especially outside of France, a manifest tendency to aggregate all convulsions of ill-determined type into one great class, under the name "myoclonus"; and into this chaotic farrago, it is to be feared, will tumble a crowd of conditions which should be studiously differentiated: the tics, electric and fibrillary choreas, paramyoclonus multiplex, etc., etc.

There is a natural tendency to identify all "nervous movements" with myoclonus, but the conception is a remarkably nebulous one, and means nothing more than "muscular twitch." On the other hand, it is well understood that "nervous movements" are more or less sudden movements of limbs, shoulders, face, always involuntary and generally increasing in force and frequency with the nervous state of the patient.

Briefly, the "nervous movements" of which we have been speaking do not belong either to myoclonus or to tic, but owe their distinctiveness to their multiplicity and inconstancy.

CHAPTER XIV THE RELATION OF TICS TO OTHER PATHOLOGICAL CONDITIONS A vast number of disturbances of motility, distinguished as spasm, chorea, cramp, myoclonus, myotonia, etc., may be derived from the same pathological substratum as tic, and an equally vast number of psychical anomalies may spring from that psychopathic diathesis of which tic is merely the motor expression.

Attention has also been directed to this question by Mannini[161]: After an attack of epilepsy the convulsive twitches are at a minimum, but during the next few days the myoclonus, or rather the polyclonus, becomes increasingly intense and varied, until it reaches a maximum, which is crowned by a second epileptic fit.