Comparison of Muscle Synergies Between Parkinson’s Disease Patients and Healthy Controls During Walking Over a Mat
摘要
Patients who suffer from Parkinson’s disease (PD) usually present gait dysfunction. The analysis of muscle synergies has been used to unravel neural strategies underlying human locomotion. The main goal of this study was to compare muscle synergies between three PD patients at the early stage of the disease and three healthy controls, when walking on flat terrain and over a mat at self-selected speed. Muscle synergies were extracted from electromyography data of eight lower limb muscles using a non-negative factorization algorithm. Detailed synergy analyses showed differences between groups (in both terrains) in terms of variability accounted for of tibialis anterior and soleus. This study shows the ability of muscle synergies analysis to reveal impaired motor coordination in PD patients and adds more evidence that PD patients present abnormal activation of distal lower limb muscles, even at the early stage of the disease.