Abasia: Types And Characteristics Of This Disability
There are different disorders or injuries that can prevent or hinder a person’s ability to walk.
One of those that we can find is the abasia Below we will discover what characteristics this pathology has, how it can originate and what are the possible treatments that can be applied to achieve improvement.
Abasia is a medical disorder that refers to a lack of ability in the subject who suffers from it to coordinate the movements necessary to be able to walk , which would be a form of ataxia. Due to this, the action of standing or taking steps becomes difficult or impossible, depending on the severity of the abasia in the subject.
Those who can walk do so in an erratic and clumsy manner, and falls to the ground are very likely, since the impossibility of coordination means that the person needs a titanic effort to link several steps in a row, if they manage to do so.
One of the problems that makes this pathology prevent the patient from walking is that the steps that can be taken do not have a general trend in terms of distance, so sometimes shorter steps and sometimes longer steps are taken, randomly. , preventing you from moving forward regularly, which makes you lose your balance frequently.
Sometimes, abasia can be accompanied by another movement deficit known as astasia and which implies a lack of ability in the subject to remain vertical, that is, standing, without external help (someone to hold him or some element to lean on).
Organic causes
Abasia arises from damage to certain brain regions, and can have a diverse origin. It can be caused, for example, by a stroke that is, a stroke, which would leave a part of the brain involved in the movements necessary for walking without oxygen.
It can also be caused by a disease known as hydrocephalus , which alters the pressure levels of the brain due to an excess of cerebrospinal fluid surrounding this organ, and therefore can also damage part of its tissues, generating different pathologies depending on the affected area. One of them would be the abasia.
Another disease that could end up leading to difficulty coordinating steps would be Parkinson’s, one of the best-known neurological pathologies. By suffering a progressive degeneration of neuronal tissue, There may come a time when damage occurs to the critical points in the brain that allow us to walk beginning to suffer, from that moment, from abasia.
There are lesser-known diseases, such as Guillain-Barré syndrome, which are also sometimes responsible for triggering the disorder in question. In this case we would be talking about an autoimmune type disease, which little by little causes the paralysis of the extremities, making it increasingly difficult for the person to walk, apart from many other symptoms such as loss of sensitivity.
However, in the case of Guillain-Barré syndrome, the patient’s ability to recover is very good. In general, up to 90% of those affected by this disorder usually improve and recover almost completely approximately twelve months after the symptoms begin.
Another reason that can generate an abasia would be any damage that affects the cerebellum, and more specifically in the vermis part a tissue that unites both hemispheres of the cerebellum itself, and which is involved in the conscious proprioceptive processes of the individual.
Phobias
We have taken a tour of a multitude of organic diseases and injuries that could generate, among many other symptoms, an abasia. However, these are not the only ways in which a person can have serious problems standing and walking.
And we must not lose sight of the psychological part of the subject and how powerful some irrational fears, such as phobias, can be. In this sense, There are several types of phobias that would directly or directly affect the person’s ability to move using your feet.
Basophobia
One of them would be basophobia or basiphobia, a phobia consisting of a terrible fear of tripping and falling while we are walking, which blocks the subject in such a way that it can force him to remain sitting or lying down all the time so as not to see the fear that terrifies him come true, which would be another form of abasia.
It occurs especially in older people who have already begun to suffer a degenerative process and do not feel safe to walk, because they fear the consequences of a possible fall, which could cause significant injuries such as a broken hip or other bones.
It is also possible to have acquired this phobia due to a real fall, which has collapsed the subject’s processing capacity so much that their brain has established not walking as a method to avoid suffering such damage again. This is a very common origin in various types of phobias (having suffered real harm and therefore avoiding at all costs the behavior that caused that first incident, so that something like that is never experienced again).
Stasiphobia
Another fear very similar to the previous one would be stasiphobia, which instead of walking, refers to the very act of standing so it would also be limiting the other behavior, since, logically, you cannot walk if you are not standing.
In addition to stasiphobia, you can also find other terms to refer to this same phobia that is causing abasia through psychological factors. Some of them would be ambulophobia, stasiphobia or stasophobia.
Stasobasophobia
Furthermore, stasiphobia can occur together with basophobia, in what is known by the clinical term stasobasophobia, a type of multiple phobia in which both behaviors are affected.
On the one hand, the person would be unable to stand up, due to the terror that the idea entails. But in addition, he would not be able to consider walking, since that action, in itself, also provokes fears in the person, which therefore is incapable of any task that involves moving with her legs
Guys
Within the abasias that have an organic base behind them, there is a broad typology depending on the implications of this restriction of leg movement. Let’s get to know the different types that we can find.
1. Atactic abasia
On the one hand we would find the atactic abasia, one in which the subject experiences a lack of certainty when moving
2. Abasia choreica
Choreic abasia, on the other hand, would be triggered by chorea (involuntary movements) that would affect the person’s lower extremities.
We would also find the paralytic type abasia caused by the patient’s inability to move the muscles of the legs and therefore suffer from an inability to walk.
4. Spastic abasia
This type of abasia, spastic, would occur when a dysfunction of the organism causes the leg muscles (at least those, since they are the ones we are concerned with) to remain contracted all the time therefore making their voluntary movement difficult.
5. Spasmodic abasia
Spasmodic abasia is similar to the previous type, but in this case muscles do not have to be constantly tense but rather the person would suffer from involuntary spasms that would contract and relax them randomly.
6. Abbasia tremula
In the case of tremulous abasia, all the muscles involved in the movements required to take steps would suffer from constant tremors, which would make it difficult for the individual to walk. This modality is also known as trembling abasia
7. Abasia with astasia
We have already mentioned before that abasia can appear only as the difficulty in moving the legs to walk, but it can also be accompanied by astasia, with which the individual would not even have the ability to stand and remain standing, or would do so but with great difficulty.
This type of abasia is also called Blocq disease known by this name because it was a disorder described for the first time by the French doctor Paul Blocq, at the end of the 19th century.
In this case we would be talking about a type of ataxia through which we would lose the automatic ability we have to perform the movements involved in the act of walking, but the curious thing is that When lying down, he could move his legs and his different muscle groups without problem
In this case, the origin of the pathology would be in the substantia nigra of the basal ganglia, as we had already anticipated in the list of possible causes for some types of abasia.
