Kessler Foundation
Center for Mobility and Rehabilitation Engineering

Author Of 1 Presentation

Biomarkers and Bioinformatics Late Breaking Abstracts

LB1269 - Higher parietal and premotor cortex activation and connectivity during treadmill walking in Persons with Multiple Sclerosis versus healthy controls (ID 2167)

Speakers
Presentation Number
LB1269
Presentation Topic
Biomarkers and Bioinformatics

Abstract

Background

Persons with Multiple Sclerosis (pwMS) experience a decline in cognitive and physical performance, which could affect their walking and their ability to attend to their surrounding environment during walking. Therefore, pwMS may show higher recruitment of brain attention network regions like parietal and premotor areas during walking (WALK), a recruitment that could increase more during obstacle avoidance while walking (OBSAV).

Objectives

This study explored Electroencephalography (EEG) based brain activation and brain connectivity during treadmill walking and during walking while avoiding virtual reality obstacles on the treadmill. The study included a group of pwMS and a health control group (HC) matched by age and gender. We expected higher brain activity and brain connectivity in parietal and premotor cortices in the pwMS group, especially in the OBSAV condition.

Methods

Data of 9 pwMS and 8 healthy controls were collected. Kessler Foundation Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved the protocol. Brain and muscles activations were collected as participants walked on an instrumented treadmill (C-MILL, Motekforce, The Netherlands). The C-MILL CueFor2 software was used to collect loading force of each participant during the walking tasks, and captured the timing of the major events of the gait cycle. EEG data were collected using a 64-channel wireless ActiCap EEG system from Brain Products (Munich, Germany). EEG data collection sampling rate was set to 500Hz and FCz EEG channel was chosen as the reference during data collection. Data were collected for a minimum 100 trials of 30-second walking at self-selected speed. Each WALK trial was followed by a 30-second trial of walking while avoiding randomly projected virtual obstacles (OBSAV). Outcomes measures included EEG signal power within alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (12-30 Hz) bands in 11 regions of interest that included bilateral parietal, premotor, frontal, and motor cortices and supplementary motor area and coherence between these regions.

Results

In comparison to the HC group, the pwMS group showed higher power of EEG signals within the beta band in the left parietal (F=7.8, p=0.008) and left premotor cortex (F=4.11, p=0.05). They also showed higher coherence between left parietal and left premotor cortices and between left premotor and left motor cortices. There was no difference in these outcomes between WALK and OBS conditions.

Conclusions

Our findings confirm the role of attention network in the control of walking and obstacle avoidance in the MS group. Our group will further investigate this network and connectivity between the brain and muscles to acquire better understanding of the interaction between cognitive and motor performance and cortical control centers and muscles participating in walking in pwMS and how that could affect pwMS daily activity.

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