HEMIBALLISMUS AFTER HEMORRHAGIC STROKE
Ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke may be accompanied by movement disorders (1), either hyperkinetic or hypokinetic. Hyperkinetic movement disorders after stroke comprise dystonia (2-4), chorea with or without hemiballismus (5), tremor (6), parkinsonism (7), segmental or focal myoclonus, athetosis, pseudathetosis, and asterixis (8). Hemiballismus is a movement disorder characterized by involuntary, arrythmic, and large amplitude excursion of a limb, usually from a proximal joint, witn an element of rotation (9). Ballismus is explainable with lesions in the subthalamic nuclei, cerebral cortex, corpus striatum, thalamus and brainstem. (10) The frequency of post-stroke abnormal movements is unclear, the prevalence in a swiss registry being 1% with an incidence of 0.08% per year (8). Of them, hemichorea-hemiballismus is the most common, while dystonia is the next most common disorder (11).