Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Approximately 66% of the United States is overweight or obese. Obesity is associated with many negative health conditions including osteoarthritis. Research has investigated the effects of increased mass on gait biomechanics, however weight-related changes stair locomotion biomechanics are less understood. PURPOSE: to assess changes in lower extremity joint moments associated with acutely added body mass during stair ascent. METHODS: Ten college aged participants performed 5 stair ascent trials in each of 5 loading conditions: body weight (BW), BW+5%, BW+10%, BW+15%, and BW+20%. Mass was added using a weighted vest. An 18-camera motion capture system (240 Hz) and embedded force platform (1200 Hz) were used to collect kinematics and ground reaction forces simultaneously. Commercial software was used to calculate ankle, knee and hip joint moments during the stance phase of second step of a five-step stairway. Univariate ANOVAs with Tukey’s post-hoc tests were used to compare peak ankle, knee and hip joint moments from each weighting condition. RESULTS: Ankle plantarflexion and knee extension moments increased with added load (Table 1). Hip extension moments were not altered with added load. DISCUSSIONS/CONCLUSION: The ankle joint is the primary contributor to increased lower extremity joint moments in response to added load during stair ascent. Though an omnibus effect of added load was observed at the knee, only one post-hoc comparison was statistically different (BW vs. BW+15%) suggesting that the knee is not responsible for increased propulsion in response to added load during stair ascent. Interestingly, no changes in peak joint moments were observed at the hip joint. A limitation of this study was that the acutely added load was not similar in location or physical properties to the increased load associated with obesity which may limit the generalizability of these findings to obese individuals.Table 1: Mean ankle, knee and hip joint moments during stair ascent in the control and added load conditions. P-value represents omnibus findings of the univariate ANOVA.
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