Faculty of Health and Wellbeing, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, S10 2BP, UK.
Department of Sport Biomechanics, Sport Sciences Research Institute, Tehran, Iran.
Eur J Appl Physiol. 2019 Oct;119(10):2349-2362. doi: 10.1007/s00421-019-04216-4. Epub 2019 Aug 31.
The aim of the current meta-analysis was to examine the extent to which there are differences in upper extremity motor synergies across different age groups in manipulative tasks.
The studies that used the uncontrolled manifold method to examine the effect of age on motor synergies in multi-joint and multi-finger tasks were selected. Sixteen relevant studies from 1154 articles were selected for the meta-analysis-4 and 12 studies considered multi-joint kinematics and multi-finger kinetic tasks respectively.
The results of the meta-analysis suggested reduced strength of synergies in multi-finger task in older adults, but this was not the case for synergies in multi-joint task. Part of this age-related difference in finger function is related to the increased variability in total force in grasping tasks. However, reductions in the strength of multi-finger synergies in hand functions following ageing appear to depend on the characteristics of the task.
These findings indicate that the cooperation among fingers to stabilise the total required force to apply for grasping and other fine motor skills is less efficient in older adults that might affect the quality of manipulative tasks.
本荟萃分析旨在考察在多关节和多指任务中，上肢运动协同作用在不同年龄组之间存在差异的程度。
选择了使用非控制流形方法来研究年龄对多关节运动协同作用的影响的研究。从 1154 篇文章中选择了 16 项相关研究进行荟萃分析，其中 4 项研究考虑了多关节运动学和多指动力学任务。
荟萃分析的结果表明，老年人在多指任务中的协同作用强度降低，但在多关节任务中并非如此。手指功能的这种与年龄相关的差异部分与抓取任务中总力的变异性增加有关。然而，随着年龄的增长，手部功能中多指协同作用的强度降低似乎取决于任务的特点。
这些发现表明，手指之间为了稳定施加抓取和其他精细运动技能所需的总力而进行的合作在老年人中效率较低，这可能会影响操作任务的质量。
