INTRODUCTION: In a population-based study of 1,912 community-dwelling @entity1 of 45   years and older, we investigated the relation between age and fine motor skills using the Archimedes spiral-drawing test. Also, we studied the effect of brain volume on fine motor skills. METHODS: @entity1 were required to trace a template of a spiral on an electronic drawing board. Clinical scores from this test were obtained by visual assessment of the drawings. Quantitative measures were objectively determined from the recorded data of the drawings. As @entity400 is known to occur increasingly with advancing age, we also rated drawings to assess presence of @entity400 . RESULTS: We found presence of a @entity400 in 1.3% of the drawings. In the group without @entity400 , we found that older age was related to worse fine motor skills. Additionally, @entity1 over the age of 75 showed increasing deviations from the template when drawing the spiral. Larger cerebral volume and smaller white matter lesion volume were related to better spiral-drawing performance, whereas cerebellar volume was not related to spiral-drawing performance. CONCLUSION: Older age is related to worse fine motor skills, which can be captured by clinical scoring or quantitative measures of the Archimedes spiral-drawing test. @entity1 with a @entity400 performed worse on almost all measures of the spiral-drawing test. Furthermore, larger cerebral volume is related to better fine motor skills.

Older age relates to worsening of fine motor skills: a population-based study of middle-aged and elderly XXXX .

@entity1 :: ('9606', 'Species') :: ['participants', 'Persons', 'Participants', 'persons'] @entity400 :: ('MESH:D014202', 'Disease') :: ['tremor']
@entity1 :: (9606,Species) :: ['persons']
