Deans' stroke musings: Neural predictors of gait stability when walking freely in the real-world

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Neural predictors of gait stability when walking freely in the real-world

If we don't even know what the neural correlates of walking in the real world are how the hell can we expect our therapists to recover us to that state?
https://jneuroengrehab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12984-018-0357-z

Sara PizzamiglioEmail author View ORCID ID profile,
Hassan Abdalla,
Usman Naeem and
Duncan L. Turner

Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation201815:11

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12984-018-0357-z

Received: 4 September 2017

Accepted: 16 February 2018

Published: 27 February 2018

Abstract

Background

Gait impairments during real-world locomotion are common in neurological diseases. However, very little is currently known about the neural correlates of walking in the real world and on which regions of the brain are involved in regulating gait stability and performance. As a first step to understanding how neural control of gait may be impaired in neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, we investigated how regional brain activation might predict walking performance in the urban environment and whilst engaging with secondary tasks in healthy subjects.

Methods

We recorded gait characteristics including trunk acceleration and brain activation in 14 healthy young subjects whilst they walked around the university campus freely (single task), while conversing with the experimenter and while texting with their smartphone. Neural spectral power density (PSD) was evaluated in three brain regions of interest, namely the pre-frontal cortex (PFC) and bilateral posterior parietal cortex (right/left PPC). We hypothesized that specific regional neural activation would predict trunk acceleration data obtained during the different walking conditions.

Results

Vertical trunk acceleration was predicted by gait velocity and left PPC theta (4–7 Hz) band PSD in single-task walking (R-squared = 0.725, p = 0.001) and by gait velocity and left PPC alpha (8–12 Hz) band PSD in walking while conversing (R-squared = 0.727, p = 0.001). Medio-lateral trunk acceleration was predicted by left PPC beta (15–25 Hz) band PSD when walking while texting (R-squared = 0.434, p = 0.010).

Conclusions

We suggest that the left PPC may be involved in the processes of sensorimotor integration and gait control during walking in real-world conditions. Frequency-specific coding was operative in different dual tasks and may be developed as biomarkers of gait deficits in neurological conditions during performance of these types of, now commonly undertaken, dual tasks.