Introduction: Focal hand dystonia affects 1% of professional musicians. Men are more affected. Risk factors are genetic, biomechanical and relative to repeated, precise and fast movements of the hand. The reason for that is too much brain plasticity which causes enlargement of the motor receptive field of the hand. There, it causes increased proprioceptive input and decrease of inhibition which can also spread to the neighboring receptive fields. It causes disorders in muscle coordination and involuntary movements shortly after the person starts to play the instrument. The location depends on the instrument and hand dominance. It is important to take thorough anamnesis about the hand injuries and burden. Treatment involves interventions that have an impact on brain plasticity, medication, and operation. Winds, strings, plugged and keyboard musicians have the most tendency to develop focal hand dystonia. Purpose: The purpose of this diploma work was to review research about the treatment options for focal hand dystonia of musicians. Methods: A descriptive method was used. First, studies in the PubMed database were searched for, then the snowball method was used to get more studies. Results: Seven articles, published between 2002 and 2014 were included and their quality was evaluated with the PEDro scale. 257 musicians – 18 were healthy (2 studies) and 6 healthy subjects (1 study) were captured in our review. The piano was the most common instrument (5 studies). By measuring the progress metronome (5 studies), questioner (2 studies) and scales for measuring the stage of dystonia (4 studies) were most commonly used. Used interventions were constraint-induced therapy (4 studies), a combination of mirrored finger movements while having different impulses with transcranial direct current stimulation (1 study) and muscle vibration. Improvement was seen in all of the above-mentioned interventions, better results were seen in musicians, who don't require too blow in their instrument. Muscle vibration has also shown improvement for healthy musicians. Discussion and conclusion: Interventions that influence brain plasticity are effective but they have to be carefully enhanced in difficulty and practice duration. The studies considered have small and heterogenic samples, so the results are difficult to generalize on the whole musicians' population. Studies with larger and homogenous samples, control group and clearer results are needed.
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