What is Torticollis? What are its causes & symptoms? - Rajkannan Pandurangan

Torticollis is otherwise called as wry neck. It indicted that the muscles of the neck, especially a muscle called as sternocleidomastoid is too tight to cause a deviation of the neck to one side. If there is a right side tightness, the patient will tilt to the left side this condition will occur in any point of time. There are three stages where this condition predominantly affcts.one for the new born, next for the children and the third type for the adults. Torticollis for the newborn, these children are born with torticollis, which is attributed to 2 major causes. One is abnormal positioning of the baby inside the womb, which could have led to these conditions. There are other theories saying that when the child is born, too much force is acting upon this muscle, thereby blocking circulation, so the muscles would have gone for tightness. So this condition has to be treated immediately because if not treated early in life , this condition is likely to have a permanent deformity like that. So this is called as infantile Torticollis which occurs during the time of birth. The second type is called as childhood torticollis. Here the causes could be because of infection or some tumor like growth happening in the sternocleidomastoid muscle or it could be due to trauma or some children can have visual imbalances and gradually they have a tightness of that muscle. This childhood Torticollis can be very well treated, provided if the cause is identified very early and if the cause is treated this condition automatically tends to gets subsided. Still some of these children will need physical therapy programme in order to regularly stretch this, muscle. Thirdly in the adult type torticollis, there are two major causes for this. One is the dystonic type of torticollis where the problem is coming from the brain .Due to abnormal firing frequencies happening on the brain, the muscles which are controlled by certain region in the brain will give tonic information to the muscle. In this case, this muscle will get tightened automatically and when the patient stories to correct himself automatically the neck will go like that. This is a very difficult condition to treated. We call this condition as dystonic torticollis, where these patient will get benefit from some medical or surgical intervention, where the cause of torticollis is because of discogenic pain. Because of weight lifting and because of trauma, then disc tends to get bulged to one side and that makes the patient to move the head to the other side. So this we call as wry neck, acute wry neck. So in this case, physiotherapy plays a major role in order to reduce the disc bulge so that the patient whose neck is like that can gradually get corrected by exercises so that he gets a normal position so these are the three types of torticollis.