Article

Early detection of balance impairment is crucial to identify individuals who may
benefit from interventions aimed to prevent falls, which is a major problem in
aging societies. Since mediolateral balance deteriorates with aging, we proposed
a mediolateral balance assessment (MELBA) tool that uses a CoM-tracking task of
predictable sinusoidal and unpredictable multisine targets. This method has shown
to be reliable and sensitive to aging effect, however, it is not known whether it
can predict performance on common daily-life tasks such as walking. This study
aimed to determine whether MELBA is an ecologically valid tool by correlating its
outputs with a measure of mediolateral gait stability known to be predictive of
falls. Nineteen community-dwelling older adults (72+/-5 years) tracked
predictable and unpredictable target displacements at increasing frequencies with
their CoM by shifting their weight sideward. Response delay (phase-shift) and
amplitude difference (gain) between the CoM and target in the frequency domain
were used to quantify performance. To assess gait stability, the local divergence
exponent was calculated using mediolateral accelerations with an inertial sensor
when walking on a treadmill (LDETR) and in daily-life (LDEDL) for one week.
Pearson product-moment correlation analyses were performed to determine
correlations between performance on MELBA tasks and LDE. Results show that
phase-shift bandwidth for the predictable target (range above -90 degrees ) was
significantly correlated with LDETR whereas phase-shift bandwidth for the
unpredictable target was significantly correlated with LDEDL. In conclusion MELBA
is an ecologically valid tool for mediolateral balance assessment in
community-dwelling older adults who exhibit subtle balance impairments.
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Langue : ANGLAIS