The effects of large scale writing on micrographia as a symptom of Parkinson's Disease

Abstract

<p>The purpose of this proposed research was to examine the effects of a 4-week intervention training focused on exaggerating the size of hand writing in people with Parkinson’s Disease (PD). This intervention will be effective using an elbow strategy while writing on a large scaled, lined, white board. It is hypothesized that the intervention would improve the PD symptom of micrographia, or tiny handwriting. The design is a pretest-posttest on 3 participants with PD. The intervention consists of 20-30 minute sessions, three self training sessions per week, one supervised training per week, for four consecutive weeks. The participants will write their cursive alphabet, 4 set sentences (written in cursive) and then finishing again with their cursive alphabet. The white board provided will be 22x28 inches, with line height at 4 inches and middle dotted line at 2 inches. The pre- and posttesting conditions are: free writing, writing a well-known phrase “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” and writing their cursive alphabet. It is hypothesized that the absolute letter size increase for all participants in post test. With this proposed research, we hope to support the hypothesis and indicate that this type of intervention may be helpful to reduce symptoms of micrographia. A larger study will most likely be needed to better determine the efficacy of this intervention.</p>