JPD: Patients with Parkinson's disease have impaired response inhibitory function during walking

Walking in daily life relies on the ability to effectively follow internally generated goals and manipulate competitive demands from the environment while maintaining athletic performance

Recent studies have considered the interaction between gait and visual and cognitive functions, and emphasized the key role of visual attention in gait, which is a means of selectively leaning toward specific stimuli and inhibiting other stimuli

When the inhibitory mechanism is affected, as in PD or aging, subjects show a decrease in the ability to avoid responding to irrelevant environmental cues, which leads to poor executive control

The execution process of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) estimates the priority of visual input according to the task goal, and projects the information to the temporal cortex through the attention circuit, which integrates all the information to successfully complete the task

In this way, Ronen Sosnika and others of Holon Institute of Technology, Israel, explored the influence of PD patients' gait on the automatic and cognitive inhibition control phase and related changes in neural activity, and compared them with young and old adults

They performed visual Go/NoGo tasks on 30 Parkinson's disease patients, 30 elderly and 11 young adults while sitting and walking on a treadmill, and recorded their brain electrical activity and gait at the same time

He found: VGNG accuracy of PD patients when walking below the young and old (F = 5.

In addition, young adults show the smallest number of electrodes, which have a significant difference in activation between sitting and walking, while PD patients show the largest amount of N2, which is more strongly expressed on bilateral parietal electrodes when walking.

These results indicate that the response inhibition of elderly subjects and Parkinson's disease patients during walking is impaired , and the increase in cognitive load during dual-task walking is related to the significant changes in scalp electrical activity, mainly in the parietal lobe and frontal center.