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Affiliation
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Department of Rehabilitation, Aged and Extended Care, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia. |
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Abstract
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OBJECTIVE: To determine if normalising spatial-temporal gait data for walking speed when obtained from multiple walking trials leads to differences in gait variability parameters associated with a history of falling in transtibial amputees.
DESIGN: Cross-sectional study of transtibial amputees with and without histories of falling in the past 12 months. SETTING: Rehabilitation centre. PARTICIPANTS: Forty-five unilateral transtibial amputees (35 male, age 60.5 (SD13.7) years) were recruited. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Participants completed 10 consecutive walking trials over an instrumented walkway. Primary gait parameters were walking speed and step-length, step-width, step-time, and swing-time variability. Participants provided a retrospective 12-month falls history.
RESULTS: Sixteen (36%) amputees were classified as fallers. Variation in gait speed across the 10 walking trials was 2.9% (range 1.1%-12.1%). Variability parameters of normalised gait data were significantly different to variability parameters of non-normalised data (all p<0.01). For non-normalised data, fallers had greater amputated limb step-time (p=0.02), step-length (p=0.02), swing-time (p=0.05), step-width (p=0.03) variability and non-amputated limb step-length (p=0.04) and step-width (p=0.01) variability. For normalised data only three variability parameters remained significantly greater for fallers. These were amputated limb step-time (p=0.05), step-length (p=0.02), and step-width (p=0.01) variability.
CONCLUSION: Normalising spatial-temporal gait data for walking speed before calculating gait variability parameters may aid in discerning the variability parameters related to falls history in transtibial amputees. This may help focus initial rehabilitation efforts of amputee patients with falls history.
Language: en |