The Effects of Muscle Fatigability on Gait Instability in Aging and Age-Related Falls Risk

项目总结 跌倒是一个严重的社会问题，具有巨大的物理和经济后果。随着我们年龄的增长，有各种各样的 与跌倒风险增加相关的因素，如传感器、运动和认知运动的下降 敏锐度。这些变化可能会影响我们如何在疲劳状态下进行补偿，以更好地动态导航 步行挑战，因为他们给老年人带来了摔倒的额外风险。最重要的科学 这一团契提议的前提是局部肌肉疲劳性妥协神经肌肉控制 行走平衡和严重加速步态的不稳定性与方向和背景有关 老年人的方式。该项目将招募30名年轻人，30名不跌倒的老年人和30名老年人 参加两次会议：一次旨在客观地针对肌肉的局部疲劳性 调节矢状面的运动和稳定性，另一个旨在客观地针对局部疲劳性 调节冠状平面运动和稳定性的肌肉。这个项目战略性地结合了复杂的 使用创新的步行平衡套件进行运动捕捉和肌电时频分析 旨在模拟现实世界平衡挑战的扰动，以确定新的机械原因 跌倒风险增加。这项研究将是第一次建立疲劳影响的机制。 通过使用方向性局部肌肉疲劳性和全面的任务特异性来实现步行稳定性 与肌肉骨骼建模和模拟相结合的步行平衡扰动集合。这一地区 机械论和假说驱动的研究一直被严重不足，但具有重要的 即时潜力，为诊断、康复、移动监控和可穿戴设备领域的新进展提供信息 减少跌倒的辅助技术。

PROJECT SUMMARY Falls are a severe societal issue with vast physical and economic consequences. As we age, there are a variety of factors that are associated with an increased falls risk such as declines in sensor, motor, and cognitive-motor acuity. These changes may affect how we compensate for being in a fatigued state to better navigate dynamic walking challenges due to the additional risks that they put older adults at for falls. The overarching scientific premise of this fellowship proposal is that local muscle fatigability compromises the neuromuscular control of walking balance and importunately precipitates gait instability in a direction-dependent and context-specific ways in older adults. This project will recruit 30 young adults, 30 older adult non-fallers, and 30 older adult fallers to participate in two sessions: one designed to objectively target the local fatigability of muscles that regulate sagittal plane motion and stability and another designed to objectively target the local fatigability of muscles that regulate coronal plane motion and stability. This project strategically combines sophisticated motion capture and electromyographic time-frequency analyses with an innovative suite of walking balance perturbations designed to emulate real-world balance challenges to identify novel mechanistic causes for increased falls risk. This research study will be the first to establish the mechanisms behind fatigues effect on walking stability through the usage of directional local muscle fatigability and a comprehensive and task specific collection of walking balance perturbations integrated with musculoskeletal modeling and simulations. This area of mechanistic and hypothesis-driven research has been severely understudied, but has significant and immediate potential to inform novel advances in diagnostics, rehabilitation, mobile monitoring, and wearable assistive technologies to mitigate falls.