When assessing an older person’s fall risk, brain
processing speed matters, University of Michigan researchers found
Newswise , January 16, 2017- “Why
does a 30-year-old hit their foot against the curb in the parking lot and take
a half step and recover, whereas a 71-year-old falls and an 82-year-old falls
awkwardly and fractures their hip?” asks James Richardson, M.D., professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation
at the University of Michigan Comprehensive
Musculoskeletal Center.
For the last several years,
Richardson and his team set out to answer these questions, attempting to find
which specific factors determine whether, and why, an older person successfully
recovers from a trip or stumble. All this in an effort to help prevent the
serious injuries, disability, and even death, that too often follow accidental
falls.
“Falls research has been sort of
stuck, with investigators re-massaging over 100 identified fall ‘risk factors,’
many of which are repetitive and circular,” Richardson explains.
“For example, a 2014 review lists the
following three leading risk factors for falls: poor gait/balance, taking a
large number of prescription medications and having a history of a fall in the
prior year.”
Richardson continues, “If engineers
were asked why a specific class of boat sank frequently and the answer came
back: poor flotation and navigational ability, history of sinking in the prior
year and the captain took drugs, we would fire the engineers!
“Our goal has been to develop an
understanding of the specific, discrete characteristics that are responsible
for success after a trip or stumble while walking, and to make those
characteristics measurable in the clinic.”
Richardson’s latest research finds that it’s not only risk factors like lower limb strength and precise perception of the limb’s position that determine if a geriatric patient will recover from a perturbation, but also complex and simple reaction times, or as he prefers to refer to it, a person’s “brain speed.” The work is published in the January 2017 edition of the American Journal of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation.
“Our study wanted to identify
relationships between complex and simple clinical measures of reaction time and
indicators of balance in elderly subjects with diabetic peripheral neuropathy,
nerve damage that can occur in those with diabetes,” Richardson says.
“These patients fall twice as often
as people their age typically do, so we wanted to examine each person’s ability
to make a decision in less than half a second, or around 400 milliseconds.
Importantly, this is also about the length of time the foot is in the air
before landing while walking, and about the time available to recover from a
stumble or trip.”
He realized they needed a new, easy
way to measure that rapid decision-making ability.
Measuring simple and complex reaction time
Using a device developed with U-M
co-inventors James T. Eckner, Hogene Kim and James A. Ashton-Miller, simple
reaction time is measured much like a drop-ruler test used in many school
science classes, but is a bit more standardized.
“The clinical reaction time
assessment device consists of a long, lightweight stick attached to a
rectangular box at one end. The box serves as a finger spacer to standardize
initial hand position and finger closure distance, as well as a housing for the
electronic components of the device,” Richardson says.
To measure simple reaction time, the
patient or subject sits with the forearm resting on a desk with the hand off
the edge of the surface. The examiner stands and suspends the device with the
box hanging between the subject’s thumb and other fingers and lets the device
drop at varying intervals. The subject catches it as quickly as possible and
the device provides a display of the elapsed time between drop and catch, which
serves as a measurement of simple reaction time.
Although measuring simple reaction
time is useful, Richardson says that the complex reaction time accuracy has
been more revealing. The initial set up of the device and subject is the same.
However, in this instance, the
subject’s task is to catch the falling device only during the random 50 percent
of trials where lights attached to the box illuminate at the moment the device
is dropped, and to resist catching it when the lights do not illuminate.
“Resisting catching when the lights
don’t go off is the hard part,” Richardson says. “We all want to catch
something that is falling. The subject must perceive light illumination status
and then act very quickly to withhold the natural tendency to catch a falling
object.”
In the study, Richardson and team
used the device with a sample of 42 subjects, 26 with diabetic neuropathy and
16 without, with an average age of 69.1 years old, to examine their complex
reaction time accuracy and their simple reaction time latency, in addition to
the usual measures of leg strength and perception of motion.
They then looked to see how well
these measures predicted one-legged balance time, the ability to control step
width when walking on a hazardous uneven surface in the research lab and major
fall-related injuries over the next 12 months.
Examining the results
In the subjects with diabetic
peripheral neuropathy, good complex reaction time accuracy and quick simple
reaction time were strongly associated with a longer one-legged balance time,
and were the only predictors of good control of step width on the uneven
surface.
In addition, they appeared to
identify those who sustained major fall-related injury during the one-year
follow up. Surprisingly, the measures of leg strength and motion perception had
no influence on step width control on the hazardous surface and did not appear
to predict major injury.
“Essentially we found that those who
were able to grab the device quickly, or quickly make the decision to let it
drop, had quick brains that were somehow helping them stay balanced and avoid
aberrant steps on the uneven surface,” Richardson says.
He explains that the ability to
avoid aberrant steps after hitting a bump while walking, and stay balanced
while performing the trials, were likely based on the participant’s brain
processing speed.
In particular, the ability to
quickly withhold, or inhibit, a planned movement is required for good complex
reaction accuracy and responding to a perturbation while walking. In both
cases, the original plan of action must be aborted and a new one substituted
within approximately a 400 milliseconds time interval.
“With this in mind, it makes perfect
sense that brains fast enough to have good complex reaction time accuracy were
also fast enough to quickly pay attention to the perturbation while walking,
inhibit the step that was planned and quickly execute a safer alternative,”
Richardson says.
“The faster your brain can oscillate
between various external stimuli, or events, and your own internal thinking
clutter, the better off you are. When an elderly person falls, it seems likely
that their brain is not keeping up with what is happening and so it is not able
to quickly, and selectively, attend to a particular stimulus, such as hitting a
curb.”
Richardson says this assessment,
which cannot be produced from a computer or pen/pencil tests, could be valuable
to other health care providers, such as primary care physicians, neurologists,
geriatricians and a variety of rehabilitation professionals.