Motor Adaptation to Weight Shifting Assistance Transfers to Overground Walking in People with Spinal Cord Injury.
Jui-Te Lin, Chao-Jung Hsu, Weena Dee and 3 others
PMID 30729754WHAT IT FOUND
In one treadmill session with lateral pelvis assistance, weight shifting and stronger-side step length improved.
Overground walking gains were limited, and speed was not clearly faster.
Key findings
01During treadmill walking with pelvis assistance, weight shifting toward the stronger side significantly increased at late adaptation and remained significantly improved after the force was removed.
02Step length on the stronger side significantly improved at late adaptation and remained significantly improved after the force was removed, while the weaker side did not show a significant change.
03Immediately after treadmill training, overground support base on the weaker side significantly reduced, and at the 10-minute follow-up overground step length on the weaker side showed a significant change; walking speed did not significantly increase.
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
The protocol compared time periods within the same participants rather than with a separate control group, so changes could reflect practice or repeated testing. The study tested one session, so it cannot show long-term training effects. Participants held the side bar and could use body weight support, which may have altered the effect of pelvis assistance. The sample was small: 17 consented, 16 completed, one stopped due to increased hip joint pain, and one stronger-side step length dataset was excluded as an outlier. Most participants had tetraplegia (76%), and only 4 were classified as paraplegia, so injury-level differences cannot be concluded. Age varied from 24 to 66, and 71% were 50 or older. Changes in step length and speed were small after one session. The intervention used a custom cable-driven robotic system, and the paper notes robotic gait training systems can be costly for many clinics.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The paper is listed as supported by NIH extramural research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that pelvis assistance makes people with incomplete spinal cord injury walk faster overground. The speed did not clearly increase, the sample was small, and only one session was tested.