Bimanual coordination in Parkinson's disease: Deficits in movement frequency, amplitude, and pattern switching

Abstract

Six patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) and six age-matched controls participated in a variety of rhythmic bimanual coordination tasks. The main goal of the task was to perform inphase or antiphase patterns of pronation and supination of the forearms at a specified tempo, and to switch from one pattern to the other upon presentation of a visual cue. The availability of advance information was varied to examine whether deficits would emerge under choice versus pre-cue constraints. In pre-cue conditions, the subjects knew in advance which hand would be cued to initiate pattern change. In choice conditions, the cued hand was not known until the imperative stimulus was presented. Overall, the PD patients made movements with significantly lower frequencies and smaller amplitudes relative to controls. Patients exhibited spontaneous pattern switching from antiphase to inphase at significantly lower movement frequencies than controls. During intentional switching trials, the control group was significantly faster at initiating pattern change. PD and control groups differed in the time to initiate pattern switching to a greater extent under choice conditions, suggesting that patients used advance information to increase the speed of their response. The control group exhibited a preference for spontaneous switching and intentional switching through the subdominant hand. Patients exhibited a switching preference using the impaired limb (whether or not it was subdominant). The control group made more correct responses when the subdominant side was either pre-cued or presented in choice conditions. The patients maintained the subdominant/impaired side advantage under pre-cue conditions but not choice. In the maintenance of rhythmic movement, individuals with PD were able to use advance information in terms of both speed and accuracy.

Inter-limb coupling during diadochokinesis in Parkinson's and Huntington's disease

“…Indeed, several studies have demonstrated that bimanual coordination is hampered in PD patients (Brown et al, 1993;Johnson et al, 1998;Almeida et al, 2002;Byblow et al, 2002;Alberts et al, 2004Alberts et al, , 2008Ponsen et al, 2006;Nieuwboer et al, 2009;Stegemoller et al, 2009;Wu et al, 2010;Brown and Almeida, 2011;Almeida and Brown, 2013). These deficits range from the organization and execution of simultaneous and sequential movements of the upper limbs (Schwab et al, 1954;Benecke et al, 1987;Marsden, 1989;Harrington and Haaland, 1991;Klockgether and Dichgans, 1994;Bennett et al, 1995;Weiss et al, 1997;Alberts et al, 1998;Johnson et al, 1998), to decreased degree of phasing accuracy and stability (Swinnen et al, 1997;Johnson et al, 1998;Serrien et al, 2000), and several others.…”

Timing Control in Parkinson’s Disease

“…During symmetrical (in-phase) triangle drawing, smaller amplitudes were seen but only symmetrical patterns were used . Smaller amplitudes of movements were found predominantly with increasing the frequency from below to above the spontaneous transition frequency (Byblow et al, 2002). More variable amplitude was seen across all conditions for individuals with PD (Serrien et al, 2000).…”

Validation studies of the human movement analysis panel for hand/arm performance

“…movements. These techniques vary in the specific aspect of motor function measured, and include grip and load force variation (Fellows and Noth, 2004;Guo et al, 2004;Hejdukova et al, 2003;Hermsdorfer, 2002, 2006), finger and thumb movements during day-to-day activities (Sauermann et al, 2005;Simone and Kamper, 2005), timing, velocity and force of finger tapping (Aparicio et al, 2005;Bazner et al, 2005;Kandori et al, 2004;Yahalom et al, 2004), and kinematics of wrist flexion-extension (Byblow et al, 2003), handwriting (Caligiuri et al, 2006) gross arm movement (Byblow et al, 2002;Rand et al, 2002), and reach-to-grasp movements (Hosseini et al, 2000;Jackson et al, 2000;Rand et al, 2006;Tunik et al, 2004;Wenzelburger et al, 2000;Whishaw et al, 2002). Portable and convenient methods measure single aspects of motor function, such as finger bending movements (Sauermann et al, 2005;Simone and Kamper, 2005).…”