This study provides Class III evidence that chewing gum increases swallow frequency and decreases latency of swallowing in an experiment in patients with stage 2 to 4 Parkinson disease who are nonsymptomatic for significant prandial dysphagia.
While many studies have reported on the use of kinematic analysis on well-controlled, in-laboratory mobility tasks, few studies have examined the challenges of recording dynamic mobility in home environments. This preliminary study evaluated whole body mobility in eleven patients with Parkinson disease (H&Y 2-4). Patients were recorded in their home environment during scripted and non-scripted mobility tasks while wearing a full-body kinematic recording system using 11 inertial motion sensors (IMU). Data were analyzed with principal component analysis (PCA) in order to identify kinematic variables which best represent mobility tasks. Results indicate that there was a large degree of variability within subjects for each task, across tasks for individual subjects, and between scripted and non-scripted tasks. This study underscores the potential benefit of whole body multi-sensor kinematic recordings in understanding the variability in task performance across patients during daily activity which may have a significant impact on rehabilitation assessment and intervention.
Previous, studies have demonstrated variability in the frequency and amplitude in tremor between subjects and between trials in both healthy individuals and those with disease states. However, to date, few studies have examined the composition of tremor. Efficacy of treatment for tremor using techniques such as Botulinum neurotoxin type A (BoNT A) injection may benefit from a better understanding of tremor variability, but more importantly, tremor composition. In the present study, we evaluated tremor variability and composition in 8 participants with either essential tremor or Parkinson disease tremor using kinematic recording methods. Our preliminary findings suggest that while individual patients may have more intra-trial and intra-task variability, overall, task effect was significant only for amplitude of tremor. Composition of tremor varied among patients and the data suggest that tremor composition is complex involving multiple muscle groups. These results may support the value of kinematic assessment methods and the improved understanding of tremor composition in the management of tremor.
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