Facilitating Weight Shifting During Treadmill Training Improves Walking Function in Humans With Spinal Cord Injury: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study.
Ming Wu, Janis Kim, Feng Wei
PMID 29547448WHAT IT FOUND
A treadmill training programme with body-weight support, overground walking, and robotic pelvis and leg swing assistance improved walking endurance in 14 people with incomplete spinal cord injury, but walking speed did not improve clearly.
Key findings
01After robotic treadmill training, 6-minute walking distance increased from 120 ± 37 m to 157 ± 59 m, and was 151 ± 60 m at follow-up.
02Treadmill only training did not improve 6-minute walking distance: it was 218 ± 92 m before, 225 ± 96 m after, and 229 ± 93 m at follow-up.
03The gain in 6-minute walking distance was greater after robotic training than treadmill only training, while gains in self-selected and fast walking speed were not clear between groups.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
Only 14 of 16 participants completed all training and assessments, so the sample was very small. The therapists who delivered training and assessed outcomes were not blinded. The treadmill only group began with greater endurance than the robotic group, which could affect the comparison. All participants could already walk with or without assistive devices, so the study does not show what would happen for people unable to walk with a device. The training used a custom robotic system, not a standard clinic device. The subgroup comparison by injury level was too small to support conclusions. The robotic group received body-weight support, treadmill training, overground walking, pelvis assistance, and leg swing assistance together, so the contribution of any single component cannot be separated.
Declared interests
The supplied article metadata lists NIH extramural and non-U.S. government research support; no author conflicts statement is included in the text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that pelvis weight-shifting assistance alone caused the endurance gain. The robotic group also received body-weight support, treadmill training, overground walking, and leg swing assistance, and the study cannot separate these components.