Loss of coordination in leg - Official runner's dystonia / focal dystonia discussion thread

Also, check out what this fella has posted. Precisely what I've been talking about....

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=2669671

I went to a doctor for acupuncture treatment and she wouldn't even treat me, instead she wrote a referral for a knee MRI which I have tomorrow. She said that it's possible that I could have a baker's cyst or maybe a stretched ligament. I'm hoping it will find something.

I just can't understand what the problem is, why I have this feeling of clumsiness on my left side after 2 and a half years, why I feel it with almost every step.

I had the opportunity to see a couple movement disorder specialists at the Mayo Clinic neurology department this week in Scottsdale. They have diagnosed me with a type of dystonia and prescribed a seizure/muscle relaxant medication called Baclofen- no guarantees of course. More info here:

http://www.wemove.org

. I know that several pages back someone posted about runner's dystonia...

I actually passed on this message thread to the doctors because they said a 3rd doc among them might be interested in doing a study. Maybe they are reading this now... ;-)

Forever a skeptic now after many years of looking for an answer, I'm not convinced about the dystonia because of one particular thing they said at my final appointment. I reviewed the above website they had given me and brought notes in the final appt. I read on the website that the affected limb will have increased muscle tone and I noted that that symptom does not match me, because I have markedly decreased muscle tone in my problematic left leg. I told this to the doctor and he said that there are NO neuromuscular disorders that cause decreased muscle tone. None.

So, hmm... I suppose that means I must not really have dystonia. (Aren't we all posting over and over about weak gluts/hams/adductors/etc??? My problematic leg def has decreased muscle tone.) However, I have the scrip and will try the drug to see if it helps and that the side effects aren't too bad. Perhaps the decreased muscle tone is a long term effect of the dystonia disorder, which the doctor's blanket statement does not mean to include...

geez this thread is a joke.

toughen up your glute

end of thread!

My L4 has an annular tear with loss of disc fluid oozing out causing nerve compression, and, fragments pressing into the spine causing nerve compression. It is not a bulging disc, but a herniated disc because the protrusion breaks through the wall of the disc. I saw the CD images and written MRI reports of my lumbar and sacral MRIs showing this.

This is a very good explanation:

http://www.spinalneurosurgery.com/lumbar%20discectomy.htm

Here is a link to another Letsrun thread about this:

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?board=1&id=2499432&thread=2498689

Hope this helps some other of you with the loss of muscle coordination problem. I suggest getting your discs checked out... I wish I had been directed to do that 7 years ago!

Miss Osage County,

Thanks so much for your constant persistence in finding a resolution to this problem that we're all experiencing.

When this problem originally developed, everyone thought it was disk related. I had X-rays done of my back but no MRIs of that area. (I later had MRIs of my leg, glute and head (to rule out MS)). The X-rays did not indicate any issues.

Typically whenever anything is disk related, there is pain (sciatica, etc). From your previous posts, I don't recall you mentioning any pain with this problem (I don't have any).

When you were discussing the results of the MRI, did the sports med say whether the annular tear and loose fragments floating around could cause the loss of control but not elicit any pain?

Thanks!

Yes, he said it could cause loss of control but not elicit pain. If SENSORY nerves are affected, you can get SENSATIONS of pain, numbness, tingling. If MOTOR nerves are affected, you can get loss of MOTOR control....

I believe it was on one of the links I posted in my previous post that someone said a determinant for back surgery is: Back pain alone is not a strong cause for back surgery. Weakness or loss of function in your peripherals (arms or legs) IS a strong cause for surgery. These two symptoms are usually indicative of a neural problem, commonly a compression of a nerve that inhibits the proper functioning of a peripheral (arm/leg)...

agreed. this thread is a joke. glute med strengthening + hip flexor strengthening + hamstring curls = no problems during racing. do the strength work. end of thread.

updates???

anything????

I just had 2 weeks of spinal decompression treatments on a machine called the DRX 9000. I'm not convinced it will fix my damaged disk, but the spine surgeon said "the risks of surgery would not outweigh the rewards" at this point until I've tried the therapy. I'm doing the same old strengthening exercises with a PT person and then have my back pulled/stretched on the machine with half my body weight for 30min. I know my problematic left leg is weak, but without the proper messages from the nerve it is difficult to strengthen...

Hope this may help someone. Have your lumbar spine MRI-ed for a disk compression that could be compromising the integrity of the nerves feeding the legs. My anterior tib is one of my muscles shut down and that's why I get the floppy foot with supination...

Miss Osage County,

Did you get your spine x-rayed before you got an MRI? If you did, did anything show up? The reason I ask is that I think I am having similar leg and back problems and I recently had my spine x-rayed, but nothing showed up. The doctors don't really seem to be on my side on this one, but I might push to get my an MRI for back if something like a disk compression isn't going to show up on an X-ray. Better now than a year down the road when I still can't run.

Also, did you have any symptoms of ITB, knee pain?

It's been a while since I was on here last, and somehow my post got moved to another thread, I guess I don't know what I am doing. Anyways, I felt obligated to share some of the progress I have made with this issue and some of the things I have discovered. I've put this off for fear of jinxing myself, but here goes.

I seem to have discovered the root cause of my hip problem. I had mentioned earlier about an MRI discovering adhesions in my hip (basically my TFL/glute medius were a total knotted mess not able to work properly). But I hadn't figured out how that happened. I had been going to recieve Graston treatment and that made significant progress, but really it just removed the adhesions, which needed to happen to make progress, but it didn't solve the root of the problem.

As it turns out the foot on my bad leg (left leg) pronates (collapses inward a little when I run) right when I go to push off, and that stress is being transferred to the lateral side of my leg. When I stand normally my left hip actually sits a little lower than the right because my left foot is slightly collapsing inward, it is noticable in the protrusion of the navicular bone and in the arch a little. But if I arch my foot back to "neutral position" then my hips are level, and I think this is what is causing the problem. So I have some orthodics on the way, but recently I have a small lift in my left shoe that seems to be helping also. I'm not quite back to 100%, but things have been going well for a few weeks so I wanted to share and see if this could help anyone out.

My only spine xray was 5 years ago in a chiropractor's office. It showed S-curve scoliosis, but nothing was said about a disk issue. Although, the chiro was a joke so it very well could have showed up and he didn't notice/see it.

I had a nerve conduction test June 2008 by a neurologist that came back normal and I asked him to write a referral for the MRI to check my nerve roots. That is how I got the MRI taken and thus the bulging disk damage was identified (even though I went in thinking it was a damaged sciatic nerve that would show up...).

I did/do get ITB and knee pain. Mostly this is because when my left leg shuts down, I get severe knee splay and supination so that my whole left leg is rotated outward. Other muscles fight to pull the leg back in and I get serious torque on both ends of my fibula--- at the ankle and knee--- as my leg fights to do this. So, my knee pain is more of an effect of the actual dead leg feeling.

Yes, go for the MRI if you think it is a back problem! I had mine done on the biggest magnet there is, the 3 Tesla Magnet at a SimonMed facility. Don't waste your time on an open-tube MRI or anything. If your prob is exercise induced, you're laying flat in the MRI and want to make sure it's a high quality magnet that will pick up the prob even without you being weight-bearing laying there in the tube.

http://www.simonmed.com/

Have you all heard about Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck's injury?: dead leg due to bulging disk. My advice is to get a high-quality MRI of your back! I'm glad you've discovered your problem, Ryan, and are working on the hip adhesions, but I've found I have 2 bulging disks shutting down the nerves that control dorsal flexion and knee extension. Maybe over the years I have developed some adhesions as well and I could look into that...but my underlying problem is the damaged disks. Hope this helps some of you...

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/seahawks/2008-10-28-hasselbeck_N.htm?csp=34

Other possible things to look into include shortened & overused biceps femoris, knots & adhesions in the calf due to the persistent pronation in the bad foot, nerve entrapment in the foot(Morton's Neuroma), poorly engaged TVA esp during running.

BUMP

Miss Osage County wrote:

Have you all heard about Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck's injury?: dead leg due to bulging disk. My advice is to get a high-quality MRI of your back! I'm glad you've discovered your problem, Ryan, and are working on the hip adhesions, but I've found I have 2 bulging disks shutting down the nerves that control dorsal flexion and knee extension. Maybe over the years I have developed some adhesions as well and I could look into that...but my underlying problem is the damaged disks. Hope this helps some of you...

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/seahawks/2008-10-28-hasselbeck_N.htm?csp=34

Miss Osage County,

I've experienced that too myself, the nerves shutting down dorsiflexion and knee extension, and I've also got adhesions same spots as Ryan. I recall 2 distinct incidences of lower back pain, once 8 years ago after an intense period of swim training (esp doing the butterfly), and again around 3 years ago after doing stiff legged dead lifts with heavier loads than usual.

But I can't tell if the foot mechanics caused the back pain, or vice versa. I could have developed back strain due to compensation for shut down glutes, or the back had a disc bulging and caused my mechanics to go haywire. I have the same screwed up left foot mechanics as you do. Not a clear cut situation to me.

At first I rested and the pain went away. But as months flew by my movement became affected. Symptoms seem to shift all around. Still searching for an answer though.

So here's the latest---

The week before Christmas I reconnected with one of the specialists I mentioned in the above old post from March. He was curious about whatever came of my injury. I updated him on all my various tests over the course of the year, and that a back MRI showed 2 bulging discs in the lower back and that was determined to be the cause of my loss of muscle coordination. He asked a lot of questions and he wasn't convinced of the diagnosis because of this clue: I can work around my injury in tempo runs by running a mile, and then stopping for 30sec to let my leg calm down. I start up again with no symptoms. The symptoms come back, and I stop again at the end of the next mile, but after another 30sec break, they're gone again. He said if the back was causing my problem, my leg would not respond to such little rest, that some sort of protein is released by the nerve when it is irritated by the disc and that protein essentially paralyzes the muscle it serves. Even in a highly-trained elite athlete with a fairly high metabolism and rate of recovery, it would be unlikely that in 30sec, I could essentially, "go back to normal".

Soooo I got him copies of all my tests results from the year and he suggested that I redo my nerve conduction test. He thought the first one looked really incomplete, that all levels of the spine weren't tested for AND that the good right leg wasn't tested to compare against the bad left leg. He set me up with a friend of his in a neurosurgeon's office and it made the first guy's test from the summer look like he had used an easy bake oven. This new guy had a computer and much better equipment and spend over 2 hours testing me and showing me how each nerve graph looked on his computer so I could see what was going on.

He diagnosed me with a peroneal nerve entrapment and showed me the data. I could see the pattern of the nerve was different than the others he tested. I don't understand everything, but there was apparently a lot of damage in the big toe and at the fibular head of knee.