Older adults, as well as those with certain neurological disorders, may compensate for poor neural control of postural stability by widening their base of foot support while walking. However, the extent to which this wide-based gait improves postural stability or affects postural control strategies has not been explored. People with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (iPD, n = 72), frontal gait disorders (FGD, n = 16), and healthy older adults (n = 32) performed walking trials at their preferred speed over an 8-m-long, instrumented walkway.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Investigate the brain functional networks associated with motor impairment in people with Parkinson's disease (PD).
Background: PD is primarily characterized by motor dysfunction. Resting-state functional connectivity (RsFC) offers a unique opportunity to non-invasively characterize brain function.
Over the course of the disease, freezing of gait (FoG) will gradually impact over 80% of people with Parkinson's disease (PD). Clinical decision-making and research design are often based on classification of patients as 'freezers' or 'non-freezers'. We derived an objective measure of FoG severity from inertial sensors on the legs to examine the continuum of FoG from absent to possible and severe in people with PD and in healthy controls.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: To investigate if digital measures of gait (walking and turning) collected passively over a week of daily activities in people with Parkinson's disease (PD) increases the discriminative ability to predict future falls compared to fall history alone.
Methods: We recruited 34 individuals with PD (17 with history of falls and 17 non-fallers), age: 68 ± 6 years, MDS-UPDRS III ON: 31 ± 9. Participants were classified as fallers (at least one fall) or non-fallers based on self-reported falls in past 6 months.