Quantification of Rigidity in Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

In this paper, a new method for quantification of rigidity in elbow joint of Parkinsonian patients is introduced. One of the most known syndromes in Parkinson's disease (PD) is increased passive stiffness in muscles, which leads to rigidity in joints. Clinical evaluation of stiffness in wrist and/or elbow, commonly used by clinicians, is based on Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating System (UPDRS). Subjective nature of this method may influence the accuracy and precision of evaluations. Hence, introducing an objective standard method based on quantitative measurements may be helpful. A test rig was designed and fabricated to measure range of motion and viscous and elastic components of passive stiffness in elbow joint. Measurements were done for 41 patients and 11 controls. Measures were extracted using Matlab-R14 software and statistic analyses were done by Spss-13. Relation between each computed measure and the level of illness were analyzed. Results showed a better correlation between viscous component of stiffness and UPDRS score compared to the elastic component. Results of this research may help to introduce a standard objective method for evaluation of PD.

Use of the Gait Deviation Index for the Evaluation of Patients With Parkinson's Disease

“…For this reason, the degree of impairment obtained by the UPDRS for these patients is more severe because the use of walking devices is considered as a disabling factor; on the other side, the degree of impairment obtained by the GDI is mild-moderate because the use of an aiding device leads to a more functional walking strategy. Second, another reason may be connected to the subjective nature of the UPDRS, which may influence the accuracy and precision of evaluations (Sepehri et al, 2007) state. These results highlighted that GDI may represent a feasible tool to quantify the outcomes of levodopa treatment in the PD patients.…”

Physiological and Biomechanical Analyses of Rigidity in Parkinson's Disease

“…The underlying approach is to measure the amount of imposed force resistance to externally generated passive movement about the examined joint. The passive movements applied in earlier studies were induced either by a torque motor (Fung et al, 2000;Mak et al, 2007;Shapiro et al, 2007;Watts et al, 1986;Xia et al, 2006) or generated by an examiner to closely resemble a clinical setting (Caligiuri, 1994;Endo et al, 2009;Patrick et al, 2001;Prochazka et al, 1997;Sepehri et al, 2007). Variables described in these previous studies included peak torque (Mak et al, 2007), impulse (i.e., an integral of torque with respect to time; Fung et al, 2000), work score which is calculated as a torque integral with respect to joint angular position (see Fig.…”

Optimization in measurement of MVC and active stiffness in wrist using the quick release method

“…This is why researchers had tried to find objective methods for these evaluations [1][2][3][4][5][6]. It should be mentioned that these objective efforts were not specified for measurements in wrist and had been done for other human joints like elbow and ankle [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”