Novel spatiotemporal analysis of gait changes in body weight supported treadmill trained rats following cervical spinal cord injury

Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation, 2017 · DOI: 10.1186/s12984-017-0308-0 · Published: September 7, 2017

Spinal Cord Injury Rehabilitation Biomedical

Simple Explanation

The study introduces a new way to analyze how people walk, focusing on the entire movement rather than separate parts like stride length or step height. This method was used to see if treadmill training with body weight support helps rats recover after a spinal cord injury. The stepping of healthy rats never deviated from their initial week 1 performance. There was a modest asymmetry in the 4th week (RE 2.51), but it did not persist into the 5th week. BWSTT improves right hindlimb stepping during the active training sessions (gray dots between weeks) but induces a deleterious after-effect when the BWS is removed for weekly assessments.

Study Duration

7 weeks

Participants

108 rats with spinal cord injury, 6 uninjured rats, 17 untrained and 10 BWSTT animals

Evidence Level

Not specified

Key Findings

1
Stepping is asymmetrically altered 1 week after SCI. The differences in stepping change over the following weeks, with the less impaired left hindlimb deviating further away from pre-injury than the more impaired right hindlimb.
2
BWSTT improves the stepping of the right hindlimb, but only when the BWS is active. If the BWS is not present, the performance of trained animals is worse than untrained rats.
3
The left hindlimb performance of BWSTT rats is worse than untrained rats, during both training sessions and weekly assessments.

Research Summary

This study introduces a novel multidimensional gait analysis method to assess the ability of body weight supported treadmill training (BWSTT) to improve rodent stepping after spinal cord injury (SCI). The novel multidimensional analysis shows that stepping is asymmetrically altered 1 week after SCI. The differences in stepping change over the following weeks, with the less impaired left hindlimb deviating further away from pre-injury than the more impaired right hindlimb. BWSTT does not improve this spontaneous recovery, but exacerbates it, particularly in the less impaired left hindlimb.

Practical Implications

Refined Gait Analysis

The novel multidimensional analysis technique can be used to analyze gait in a more holistic manner, considering the interdependencies of gait parameters.

BWSTT Re-evaluation

The study suggests that BWSTT may not always improve spontaneous recovery after SCI and can potentially exacerbate compensatory techniques, especially in the less impaired limb.

Training Paradigm Optimization

Future research should focus on optimizing BWSTT paradigms, such as maintaining higher levels of body weight support, to improve outcomes and avoid deleterious after-effects.

Study Limitations

1
The study only analyzed hindlimb stepping, as the robotic device did not allow for forelimb tracking.
2
The study used a specific cervical over-hemisection injury model, which may limit the generalizability of the findings to other types of SCI.
3
The study's novel gait analysis technique lacks specificity, making it difficult to pinpoint the exact sources of the significant differences found in overall spatiotemporal relative error.

Your Feedback

Was this summary helpful?

Back to Spinal Cord Injury