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. 2022 Mar:93:96-101.
doi: 10.1016/j.gaitpost.2022.01.020. Epub 2022 Jan 26.

Overground versus treadmill walking in Parkinson's disease: Relationship between speed and spatiotemporal gait metrics

Chiahao Lu  1 , Kenneth H Louie  2 , Emily L Twedell  3 , Jerrold L Vitek  4 , Colum D MacKinnon  4 , Scott E Cooper  4
Affiliations

Overground versus treadmill walking in Parkinson's disease: Relationship between speed and spatiotemporal gait metrics

Chiahao Lu et al. Gait Posture. 2022 Mar.

Abstract

Background: Treadmills provide a safe and convenient way to study the gait of people with Parkinson's disease (PD), but outcome measures derived from treadmill gait may differ from overground walking.

Objective: To investigate how the relationships between gait metrics and walking speed vary between overground and treadmill walking in people with PD and healthy controls.

Methods: We compared 29 healthy controls to 27 people with PD in the OFF-medication state. Subjects first walked overground on an instrumented gait walkway, then on an instrumented treadmill at 85%, 100% and 115% of their overground walking speed. Average stride length and cadence were computed for each subject in both overground and treadmill walking.

Results: Stride length and cadence both differed between overground and treadmill walking. Regressions of stride length and cadence on gait speed showed a log-log relationship for both overground and treadmill gait in both PD and control groups. The difference between the PD and control groups during overground gait was maintained for treadmill gait, not only when treadmill speed matched overground speed, but also with ± 15% variation in treadmill speed from that value.

Significance: These results show that the impact of PD on stride length and cadence and their relationship to gait speed is preserved in treadmill as compared to overground walking. We conclude that a treadmill protocol is suitable for laboratory use in studies of PD gait therapeutics.

Keywords: Gait disorders; Overground; Parkinson’s disease; Speed; Treadmill.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have no conflict of interest to report.

Declaration of interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
The change in average stride length and cadence between overground and treadmill walking for individual subject. Open circle represents individual average value while solid lines represents an increasing trend and dashed lines represents a decreasing trend from overground to treadmill respectively. Orange is for control and blue is for PD.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Log-log plot of the relationship between gait metrics and gait speed during overground (left column) and treadmill (right column) walking. Stride length (top row) and cadence (bottom row). Open circle represents individual average value (orange = controls, blue = PD). Regression lines for all subjects in each group are represented as solid lines of the corresponding color.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Log-log plot of the relationship between gait metrics and 3 different gait speeds (85, 100 and 115% overground walking speeds) during treadmill walking. Three points from each subject, connected by solid lines. Orange is for control and blue is for PD. Regression lines for control group are represented in solid line, whereas dashed line is for PD.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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