ArticlesAttending to the task: Interference effects of functional tasks on walking in Parkinson’s disease and the roles of cognition, depression, fatigue, and balance1☆,
Section snippets
Participants
Twenty people with idiopathic PD (12 men, 8 women; mean age ± standard deviation, 64.6±7.96y) and 10 healthy controls matched for age and sex (6 men, 4 women; mean age, 63.5±7.03y) were studied. PD subjects had a mean disease severity of 2.7±.69 on the Hoehn and Yahr scale20 and a mean disease duration of 10±6.2 years. Ethics approval for the study was granted by the Newcastle and North Tyneside Health Authority Joint Ethics Committee, UK. All subjects gave informed written consent. Their
Participant details
Subjects’ demographic and clinical details are given in table 1. Two PD subjects were excluded from the analysis because they were unable to perform the functional task at the time of testing. We used independent 2-tailed t tests to compare PD and control subjects. There were no significant differences in age, sex, or premorbid intelligence quotient. There was a significant difference in MMSE scores; however, all subjects scored above 26, indicating the absence of dementia. Compared with
Discussion
Our main findings in this study were that performance of additional tasks resulted in a greater reduction of walking speed and mean step length in PD subjects, compared with control subjects, and this was dependent on the type of task performed. Executive dysfunction, depression, physical fatigue, and balance showed significant relationships with gait speed in the performance of the tasks in the functional test.
Conclusions
Our study extended the findings of others by testing subjects in their home environment, thus increasing ecological validity. In addition, other factors that may compete for attention were evaluated and compared with changes measured in walking speed. Thus, we can gain a better understanding of the role of other clinical symptoms on attention and its subsequent effect on the ability to conduct functional activities. This information is useful in that it may help identify specific advice that
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. David Burn (Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Trust) and Dr. Richard Walker (Northumbria Health Care NHS Trust) for their help and support with subject recruitment for the study.
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Supported by the European Commission Framework V funding (grant no. QLRT-2001-00120).
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No party having a direct interest in the results of the research supporting this article has or will confer a benefit on the author(s) or on any organization with which the author(s) is/are associated.