NCT04503187

Motor Skill Acquisition Between Individuals With Neurological Disorders and Healthy Individuals

Comparison of Motor Skill Acquisition Between Individuals With Neurological Disorders

• Status: Unknown
• Phase: —
• Study type: Observational
• Enrollment: 130 (estimated)
• Sponsor: Texas Woman's University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 21 Years – 90 Years
• Healthy volunteers: —

Summary

Stroke survivors frequently show persistent gait deficits in their chronic stages even after years of intensive rehabilitation. This may be caused by diminished capability of re-acquiring motor skills post stroke. Thus, the overall purpose of this research project is to examine stroke survivors' capability of learning a novel leg task over 3 visits, 1-2 weeks apart. The capability of learning a new skill is then correlated with the individual's neurological functions (nerve activity and movement coordination) and her/his gait performance (gait speed, gait symmetry, and force production).

Detailed description

The walking after stroke called "hemiparetic gait" is characterized by slow and asymmetrical steps with poor motor control on the paretic leg while paradoxically increasing the cost of energy expenditure. Biomechanical evidence shows that impaired gait performance for people with chronic stroke is not solely the result of the loss of muscle strength, but involves complicated movement discoordination across multiple joints in the affected leg. This has been taken to indicate a persistent motor control deficit in the paretic leg post stroke. Recent imaging studies suggest that the persistent motor control deficit after stroke may be the result of the disruption of motor memory consolidation, a process by which a newly-learned motor skill is transformed from a fragile state to a stable state and is "saved" in our brain afterward. This indicates that the same brain area responsible for controlling motor activity is also involved in memorizing newly-learned skills during the early stage of motor learning. Presence of persistent motor control deficits in the chronic stage may be attributed to the fact that damage to the brain cortex significantly impacts the ability of acquiring motor skills and consequentially defers the improvement of motor function, including gait.

Conditions

• Stroke
• Multiple Sclerosis

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Visuomotor leg reaching task	Similar to a hand reaching task in which participants were asked to reach to a tea-cup, in a visuomotor leg reaching task, participants will be seated and given real-time visual feedback about their leg movements via a cursor display on a computer screen. The task is to control a foot mouse/marker attached to the foot and move the cursor from a start location to the target displayed on a wall screen. Three different targets, equidistant from the start location at top, top-left, and top-right screen positions, will be used for leg reaching. In each trial, one of three targets will be randomly presented and subjects will be instructed to make forward, or rightward, or leftward foot reaches to guide the cursor to one of the targets. Throughout the entire experiment, subjects are blocked from viewing leg movements by a cardboard.

Timeline

• Start date: 2013-04-04
• Primary completion: 2023-12-31
• Completion: 2024-12-31
• First posted: 2020-08-07
• Last updated: 2020-08-07

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States