Discrimination of Amount of Spinal Flexion for Movements Made with and without Vision after Lumbar Disc Replacement

Abstract

Discrimination of differences between small lumbar flexion movements made when standing may differ depending on whether vision is available. Dependence on general vision during trunk movements may be increased following surgery, in which an intervertebral disc is replaced with a prosthetic disc. This study investigated whether the availability of vision changed discrimination of small differences in lumbar forward flexion movement when standing for patients with lumbar disc replacement and healthy peers. 20 volunteers without a history of back pain and 20 with disc replacement undertook a 100-trial sequence of forward flexion movements to a set of physical stops, making an absolute judgement as to the position after each movement. General (nontarget) vision during the movement was available or removed randomly trial by trial. Availability of vision did not affect discrimination of flexion movements of the lumbar spine either in normal healthy individuals or those with disc replacement.

Ability to Discriminate Movements at Multiple Joints around the Body: Global or Site-Specific

“…Participants were required to wear a loose shirt and shorts with bare feet, and to put any long hair in a bun to eliminate any confounding sensory input from skin contact during testing. the procedures for AMeDA testing of active movements of ankle inversion, knee flexion, spine flexion, shoulder flexion, and finger pinch discrimination have been described in previous studies (Waddington & Adams, 1999a, 1999bnaughton, et al, 2005;han, et al, 2011;hobbs, et al, 2011). the psychophysical method employed requires participants to make an absolute judgement after an active movement of ankle inversion, knee flexion, spine flexion, shoulder flexion, or finger pinch, made to a physical stop, i.e., participants were asked to make a decision as to which of the five movement distances they just experienced, where there were five possible responses to each of the five possible stimuli.…”

“…A battery of versions of the Active Movement extent Discrimination Apparatus (AMeDA) that had been used in previous studies was employed at 5 body sites: the ankle (Waddington & Adams, 1999b;Waddington, Adams, & jones, 1999;Waddington & Adams, 2004), knee (Waddington & Adams, 1999a;Waddington, Seward, Wrigley, lacey, & Adams, 2000), spine (hobbs, Adams, Shirley, & hillier, 2010;hobbs, Adams, Waddington, & hillier, 2011), shoulder (naughton, Adams, & Maher, 2005vulcetic, holmes, Adams, & Waddington, 2008;Whiteley, Adams, nicholson, & Ginn, 2008), and fingers (Han, Waddington, Anson, & Adams, 2011). reliability for the ankle AMeDA has been determined as 0.89 (Waddington & Adams, 2004) and 0.85 for the finger pinch AMEDA (Han, et al, 2011) .…”

Evaluation of the Relative Contribution of Peripheral and Focal Vision to Proprioceptive Differentiation of Underfoot Inversion Angles in Young Elite Athletes

“…This visual contribution does not seem to be present when testing the joint position sense in other regions of the body., e.g., no diff erence was found between the use or exclusion of vision, in testing proprioceptive acuity of lumbar spinal fl exion ( Hobbs, Adams, Waddington, & Hiller, 2011 ) or cervical spine rotation ( Lee, Nicholson, & Adams, 2004 ). This suggests that use of vision may be specifi c to the requirements of a task, and that the walking task used here benefi ts from the ecological validity achieved by allowing normal visual access to the ground surface.…”