NDLI: Mind your step: Target walking task reveals gait disturbance in individuals with incomplete spinal cord injury

Content Provider	Springer Nature : BioMed Central
Author	Mohammadzada, Freschta Zipser, Carl Moritz Easthope, Chris A. Halliday, David M. Conway, Bernard A. Curt, Armin Schubert, Martin
Abstract	Background Walking over obstacles requires precise foot placement while maintaining balance control of the center of mass (CoM) and the flexibility to adapt the gait patterns. Most individuals with incomplete spinal cord injury (iSCI) are capable of overground walking on level ground; however, gait stability and adaptation may be compromised. CoM control was investigated during a challenging target walking (TW) task in individuals with iSCI compared to healthy controls. The hypothesis was that individuals with iSCI, when challenged with TW, show a lack of gait pattern adaptability which is reflected by an impaired adaptation of CoM movement compared to healthy controls. Methods A single-center controlled diagnostic clinical trial with thirteen participants with iSCI (0.3–24 years post injury; one subacute and twelve chronic) and twelve healthy controls was conducted where foot and pelvis kinematics were acquired during two conditions: normal treadmill walking (NW) and visually guided target walking (TW) with handrail support, during which participants stepped onto projected virtual targets synchronized with the moving treadmill surface. Approximated CoM was calculated from pelvis markers and used to calculate CoM trajectory length and mean CoM Euclidean distance TW-NW (primary outcome). Nonparametric statistics, including spearman rank correlations, were performed to evaluate the relationship between clinical parameter, outdoor mobility score, performance, and CoM parameters (secondary outcome). Results Healthy controls adapted to TW by decreasing anterior–posterior and vertical CoM trajectory length (p < 0.001), whereas participants with iSCI reduced CoM trajectory length only in the vertical direction (p = 0.002). Mean CoM Euclidean distance TW-NW correlated with participants’ neurological level of injury (R = 0.76, p = 0.002) and CoM trajectory length (during TW) correlated with outdoor mobility score (R = − 0.64, p = 0.026). Conclusions This study demonstrated that reduction of CoM movement is a common strategy to cope with TW challenge in controls, but it is impaired in individuals with iSCI. In the iSCI group, the ability to cope with gait challenges worsened the more rostral the level of injury. Thus, the TW task could be used as a gait challenge paradigm in ambulatory iSCI individuals. Trial registration Registry number/ ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03343132, date of registration 2017/11/17.
Related Links	https://jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/counter/pdf/10.1186/s12984-022-01013-7.pdf
Ending Page	16
Page Count	16
Starting Page	1
File Format	HTM / HTML
ISSN	17430003
DOI	10.1186/s12984-022-01013-7
Journal	Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation
Issue Number	1
Volume Number	19
Language	English
Publisher	BioMed Central
Publisher Date	2022-03-25
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Neurosciences Neurology Rehabilitation Medicine Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Center of mass Spinal cord injury Gait Visually guided walking Balance control Motor control Locomotion
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Health Informatics Rehabilitation
Journal Impact Factor	5.2/2023
5-Year Journal Impact Factor	5.6/2023

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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