Abstract
In the elderly, walking while simultaneously engaging in other activities becomes more difficult. This study aimed to examine the changes in cortical activity during walking with aging. We try to reveal the effects of an additional task and increased walking speed on cortical activation in the young-old and the old-old elderly. Twenty-seven young-old (70.2 ± 3.0 years) and 23 old-old (78.0 ± 2.3 years) participated in this study. Each subject completed four walking tasks on the treadmill, a 2 × 2 design; two single-task (ST) walking conditions with self-selected walking speed (SSWS) and fast walking speed (FWS), and two dual-task (DT) walking conditions with SSWS and FWS. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy was applied for measurement of cerebral oxyhemoglobin (oxyHb) concentration during walking. Cortical activities were increased during DT conditions compared with ST conditions but decreased during the FWS compared with the SSWS on the primary leg motor cortex, supplementary motor area, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in both the young-old and the old-old. These oxyHb concentration changes were significantly less prominent in the old-old than in the young-old. This study demonstrated that changes in cortical activity during dual-task walking are lower in the old-old than in the young-old, reflecting the reduced adaptive plasticity with severe aging.
Highlights
In the elderly, walking performance starts to decline [1,2]
Mixed ANOVA revealed a significant main effect of task on oxyHb concentration changes in the right M1-leg, bilateral PM, supplementary motor area (SMA), right posterior parietal cortex (PPC), bilateral dlPFC, and bilateral vmPFC. These results showed that the additional dual-task during walking increased the cortical activity of the prefrontal area, including the dlPFC and vmPFC, as well as the motor area including the M1-leg, PM, and SMA
This study demonstrated that changes in cortical activity occur during aging
Summary
In the elderly, walking performance starts to decline [1,2]. The representative gait pattern characteristic of aging is a decrease in gait speed, step length, and swing phase and an increase in step width, double support time, and gait variability [2]. The central motor networks, including primary motor (M1), premotor (PM), and prefrontal (PFC) cortices, are activated during walking [6] Gait characteristics such as speed and variability are related closely to the cortical activity regulated by multiple supraspinal control mechanisms [7]. Slow gait speed in the elderly is related to the frontoparietal control network, which is related to executive function, and gait stability is related to the function of the dorsal attention network [8,9] These studies did not measure real-time functional brain activity during actual walking tasks but rather confirmed the neural correlates of gait using conventional neuroimaging tools such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET).
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