Clara Luciani: What is essential tremor, the neurological disease from which the singer suffers?

"I'm shaking all the time." Singer Clara Luciani , who will soon be performing at the We Love Green festival in Paris, spoke on Konbini's Small Talk podcast about essential tremor, a condition she suffers from and which affects her daily life.

"It's really embarrassing because there are so many situations in my life where people have said to me, 'Have you been drinking? Have you been on drugs? Are you intimidated?' And I'm not like that, I'm just shaking all the time," she explains.

Essential tremor is a common neurological disorder characterized by involuntary movements most often affecting the hands, but also the head, voice, or other parts of the body.

The exact causes of this disease, which can begin at any age, are not fully understood, but it is known that it is mainly a hereditary disorder linked to abnormalities in certain areas of the brain, notably the cerebellum, which controls movement.

The unique feature of this tremor is that it occurs when the person performs voluntary movements such as writing or grasping an object. It can worsen with emotion, fatigue, or stress. While it may initially seem like a minor annoyance, it can worsen over time.

"My mother has the same thing and I don't think it's going to get better with the years," Clara Luciani confided during her interview.

Essential tremor also has a significant psychological impact, particularly when the tremors become visible or invasive.

"What makes my tremors worse is nervousness and the fact that people can see that I'm shaking. And it was very complicated for my first TV appearances because I told myself: 'people are going to realize that I'm shaking.' And the more I thought about it, the more I shook," Clara Luciani confided to Konbini.

In her interview with Konbini, Clara Lucia revealed that she had repeatedly taken beta-blockers, a drug that slows the heart and lowers blood pressure by blocking the effect of adrenaline and is used, in particular, to reduce tremors. However, they are contraindicated in cases of asthma or severe hypotension.

An anti-epileptic drug, primidone, may also be prescribed if the beta-blocker is not enough or if the tremors are more severe. Finally, botulinum toxin injections can be administered into the affected muscle where the tremor is located. The toxin then blocks nerve transmission and relaxes the muscle, but the effect only lasts a few months.

The French Health Insurance website indicates that in the event of drug treatment failure, there are two possible surgical interventions. Note that these are only considered in rare cases. First, there is deep brain stimulation, which requires "opening the skull" and involves implanting one or more electrodes in the brain to stimulate certain areas of the brain with an electrical current.

The other possible intervention is thalamotomy, which aims to destroy the diseased tissue in the thalamus - located in the center of the brain - which receives a lot of information from our senses. This thalamotomy can be done either by radiofrequency (an electrode is inserted into the skull and destroys the damaged area with heat) or by sterotactic radiosurgery where radiation is very targeted at the area to be destroyed, without opening the skull.