Title

The Effect of Pain on Balancing Behavior: Complexity Analysis of Mediolateral Force Trajectories

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1-2019

Description

Background: Postural instability is a prevalent and deleterious consequence of aging. It is unclear how the occurrence of chronic pain augments balance issues as age progresses. Research question: We investigated how postural stability is influenced by aging and chronic pain. Methods: Fifty-five participants with and without recent chronic pain balanced on one foot while performing three tasks, a standard balancing task with no challenge, a mental task in which participants answered arithmetic questions while balancing on one foot, and a knot-tying task in which participants tied knots in a ribbon while balancing on one foot. General linear models were used to assess the relationship between age, sex, BMI, and pain category for the three different balancing tasks. In addition, a multivariate analysis of variance was used to test the effect of age and pain category on Hurst exponents from all of three different balancing tasks. Results: Our results show that aging changes the control strategy of balancing from less persistent to more repetitive. The strong feedback elements intrinsic to healthy stability ensure quick reactions and strong capacity to compensate for balance checks; this reactive state changes into a less reactive and more predictable balance strategy with age while balancing on one foot. Mental tasks during balancing also decreased the feedback in balancing strategy. Balance strategy during the knot-tying task was correlated with age, but unaffected by chronic pain. Overall, the chronic pain group had a worse balance strategy while performing the mental task in comparison with healthy people, but were not differentiable from controls in the standard or knot-tying tasks. Significance: Scores from balancing while engaging in cognitive tasks may provide evidence of health decline, and contribute to our knowledge about how pain affects feedback mechanisms.

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