Aberrant synchrony in the somatosensory cortices predicts motor performance errors in children with cerebral palsy

Abstract

Cerebral palsy (CP) results from a perinatal brain injury that often results in sensory impairments and greater errors in motor performance. Although these impairments have been well catalogued, the relationship between sensory processing networks and errors in motor performance has not been well explored. Children with CP and typically developing age-matched controls participated in this investigation. We used high-density magnetoencephalography to measure event-related oscillatory changes in the somatosensory cortices following tactile stimulation to the bottom of the foot. In addition, we quantified the amount of variability or errors in the isometric ankle joint torques as these children attempted to match a target. Our results showed that neural populations in the somatosensory cortices of children with CP were desynchronized by the tactile stimulus, whereas those of typically developing children were clearly synchronized. Such desynchronization suggests that children with CP were unable to fully integrate the external stimulus into ongoing sensorimotor computations. Our results also indicated that children with CP had a greater amount of errors in their motor output when they attempted to match the target force, and this amount of error was negatively correlated with the degree of synchronization present in the somatosensory cortices. These results are the first to show that the motor performance errors of children with CP are linked with neural synchronization within the somatosensory cortices.

Neuroimaging with magnetoencephalography: A dynamic view of brain pathophysiology

“…128 More recent work in this area has examined the oscillatory dynamics of somatosensory processing, and these studies have shown that children with CP have abnormal neural synchronization within sensorimotor cortices following tactile stimulation of the foot. 129-130 Specifically, children with CP exhibited decreased synchronization in the theta-alpha range (4-14 Hz) in response to tactile stimulation, whereas typically-developing controls showed robust increases in theta-alpha synchronization in the same medial sensorimotor cortices. 129 Interestingly, the strength of neural synchronization in the somatosensory cortices, induced by tactile stimulation, has also been connected to ankle strength, step length, and walking speed in children with CP, which suggests a direct connection between these sensory processing measures and motor performance.…”

A Lag in Speech Motor Coordination During Sentence Production Is Associated With Stuttering Persistence in Young Children

“…The mechanism underlying the group differences in LAVar is likely the atypical temporal and spatial coding of the neural commands to muscles necessary for fluent speech production (Smith, 1989) and not orofacial characteristics such as bone mass or muscle physiology (Walsh & Smith, 2013). Possible sources for the higher movement variability of CWS-Per include variability in motor planning (Churchland, Afshar, & Shenoy, 2006) and execution (Smith, 1989), aberrant neural synchrony and deficits in the use of sensory feedback (Kurz, Heinrichs-Graham, Arpin, Becker, & Wilson, 2013), and the amount of neuromotor noise during movement execution (Harris & Wolpert, 1998). Neuromotor noise arises from brain areas responsible for motor planning and execution, and may fluctuate due to movement complexity, cognitive-linguistic load, and other stressors (Churchland et al, 2006;Van Beers, Haggard, & Wolpert, 2004;Van Gemmert & Van Galen, 1997).…”

Methods for Measuring Swallowing Pressure Variability Using High-Resolution Manometry

“…Movement variability is also critical for responding to permutations in the environment and producing on-line corrections [44,50,51]. On the other hand, pathologically increased movement variability has been characterized in many neurologic conditions, including Parkinson disease [52][53][54][55][56], stroke [39,57], dystonia [41,58], developmental coordination disorder [59,60], and cerebral palsy [61,62], to name a few.…”