Postural Strategies and Sensory Integration: No Turning Point between Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the sensory integration to postural control in children and adolescents from 5 to 15 years of age. We adopted the working hypothesis that considerable body changes occurring during these periods may lead subjects to under-use the information provided by the proprioceptive pathway and over-use other sensory systems such as vision to control their orientation and stabilize their body. It was proposed to determine which maturational differences may exist between the sensory integration used by children and adolescents in order to test the hypothesis that adolescence may constitute a specific phase in the development of postural control. This hypothesis was tested by applying an original protocol of slow oscillations below the detection threshold of the vestibular canal system, which mainly serves to mediate proprioceptive information, to the platform on which the subjects were standing. We highlighted the process of acquiring an accurate sensory and anatomical reference frame for functional movement. We asked children and adolescents to maintain a vertical stance while slow sinusoidal oscillations in the frontal plane were applied to the support at 0.01 Hz (below the detection threshold of the semicircular canal system) and at 0.06 Hz (above the detection threshold of the semicircular canal system) with their eyes either open or closed. This developmental study provided evidence that there are mild differences in the quality of sensory integration relative to postural control in children and adolescents. The results reported here confirmed the predominance of vision and the gradual mastery of somatosensory integration in postural control during a large period of ontogenesis including childhood and adolescence. The youngest as well as the oldest subjects adopted similar qualitative damping and segmental stabilization strategies that gradually improved with age without reaching an adult's level. Lastly, sensory reweighting for postural strategies as assessed by very slow support oscillations presents a linear development without any qualitative turning point between childhood and adolescence.

Postural stability of canoeing and kayaking young male athletes during quiet stance

“…This is in line with our hypothesis that athletes have a different model of sensory integration, as compared to the nonathletes. The visual dependence of non-athletes supports the findings of Viel et al (2009) and Mallau et al (2010), which showed that vision plays a predominant role in adolescents' control of orientation and body stabilization, most probably due to the transient disturbances in proprioception caused by fast growth of the body parts.…”

Reliability of postural control measures in children and young adolescents

“…When visual information was not available, all of the groups behaved in the same way and differed only from adults in terms of VM, even though there was a decreasing trend; as for sX, the group of 6-year-olds differed from the groups of 11 years and above. Data obtained in Ec condition may be explained by the visual predominance in children already reported by many authors [3,8,9].…”

“…Postural control requires the organization and integration of somatosensory, visual and vestibular inputs by the central nervous system and the motor control process involved in executing musculoskeletal responses that keep the body within its limits of stability [1]. children's balance control is less developed as compared to adults and postural stability improves progressively with age from childhood to adulthood [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11].…”

Decreased postural control in adult survivors of childhood cancer treated with chemotherapy

“…The fundamental mechanisms behind postural control (e.g. sensorimotor development and functional ability) are formed and modified between childhood and adolescence through physical activity2. The developmental process of postural control involves several phases such as building repertoires of different postural strategies and learning how to apply these strategies to different environments through exploration34.…”