Neurological disorders of gait, balance and posture are both debilitating and common. Adequate recognition of these so-called disorders of axial mobility is important as they can offer useful clues to the underlying pathology in patients with an uncertain clinical diagnosis, such as those early in the course of neurological disorders. Medical teaching programmes typically take classic clinical presentations as the starting point and present students with a representative constellation of features that jointly characterize a particular axial motor syndrome. However, patients rarely present in this way to a physician in clinical practice. Particularly in the early stages of a disease, patients might display just one (or at best only a few) abnormal signs of gait, balance or posture. Importantly, these individual signs are never pathognomonic for any specific disorder but rather come with an associated differential diagnosis. In this Perspective, we offer a new diagnostic approach in which the presenting signs are taken as the starting point for a focused differential diagnosis and a tailored search into the underlying neurological syndrome.

步态，平衡和姿势的神经系统疾病既使人衰弱又很普遍。对这些所谓的轴向运动障碍的充分认识很重要，因为它们可以为临床诊断不确定的患者（例如神经系统疾病早期的那些患者）的基础病理学提供有用的线索。医学教学计划通常以经典的临床演示为起点，并向学生展示具有代表性的特征群，这些特征共同表征了特定的轴向运动综合症。但是，在临床实践中，患者很少以这种方式向医生求诊。特别是在疾病的早期阶段，患者可能仅表现出一种（或至多只有几种）步态，平衡或姿势异常迹象。重要的，这些单独的体征永远不会对任何特定的疾病致病，而是伴随着相关的鉴别诊断。在此观点中，我们提供了一种新的诊断方法，其中以出现的症状为出发点，以进行集中的鉴别诊断和针对潜在的神经系统综合症进行量身定制的搜索。