The Decline of Cortical Beta Oscillation on the Function of Eye-hand Coordination in the Healthy Elderly

Abstract

Background/Aim: There seems to be a correlation between changes in movement patterns with aging and brain activation. In the preparation and execution of movements, neural oscillations play an important role. In this study, cortical high frequency brain oscillations were analyzed in 15 healthy young adults and 15 elderly adults who participated in eyehand coordination tasks. Patients and Methods: The brain activities of healthy young and older adults were recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). Results: Elderly participants spent significantly more time completing the task than young participants. During eye-hand coordination in elderly groups, beta power decreased significantly in the central midline and parietal brain regions. The data suggest that healthy elderly subjects had intact cognitive performance, but relatively poor eye-hand coordination associated with loss of beta brain oscillation in the central midline and parietal cortex and reduced ability to attentional movement. Conclusion: Beta frequency in the parietal brain sites may contribute to attentional movement. This could be an important method for monitoring cognitive brain function changes as the brain ages. Physical degeneration and cognitive declines are common among the elderly. Furthermore, as people get older, their health begins to deteriorate, particularly motor skills (1-3), cognitive function (4, 5) and attention (5, 6). Previously, conclusive findings have been reported that body reaction, movement control, tapping speed and coordination of hands and feet were progressively decreased after 50 years old (7). These findings implied that motor control is clearly affected with increasing age. In particular, progression of age strongly affected motor skills and fine movement (8). The increased brain activities during task performance are associated with age particularly in the rostral ventral premotor cortex, intraparietal sulcus, caudal dorsal premotor cortex, caudal cingulate sulcus, intraparietal sulcus, insula, frontal operculum, and cerebellar vermis (9). Neural activities in cortical and subcortical regions during task performance were different between young and elderly people. This means that motor activities are regulated by multiple brain areas. The study on brain activity found that older participants had lower delta and theta frequency bands, as well as lower alpha frequency, while beta frequency increased. Furthermore, global activity in all bands decreased when the eyes were opened, but there was no difference between young and old people (10). Previous research discovered that the beta frequency of brain activity changes with increasing age (11). According to this study, neural synchronization of electroencephalography (EEG) in aging was maintained during rest with baseline visual perception. In addition, a previous study reported that alpha wave activity decreased in association with aging and age-related neuropathology (12).Attention has been extensively studied as an essential function of the cognitive process in terms ...