Department of Neuroscience, Rehabilitation, Ophthalmology, Genetics, Maternal and Child Health (DINOGMI), University of Genova, Campus of Savona, Genova, Italy.
Institute for Modelling and Simulation of Biomechanical Systems, Continuum Biomechanics and Mechanobiology Research Group, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2019 Nov 5;9(1):16065. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-52561-3.
Myofascial trigger points (TP) constitute a conundrum in research and clinical practice as their etiopathogenesis is debated. Several studies investigating one or few muscles have shown that both active and latent TP causes an increased muscle activity, however the influence of TP on modular motor control during a reaching task is still unclear. Electromyographic signals, recorded from the muscles of the shoulder girdle and upper arm during a reaching task, were decomposed with Non-Negative Matrix Factorization algorithm. The extracted matrices of motor modules and activation signals were used to label the muscles condition as dominant or non-dominant. The presence of latent and active TP was detected in each muscle with manual examination. Despite a similar muscle activity was observed, we found that muscles with active TP had increased weighting coefficients when labeled in the dominant condition. No influences were found when muscles were in the non-dominant condition. These findings suggest that TP altered the motor control without co-contraction patterns. As a preliminary evidence, the present results suggest that the increased weighting coefficients in presence of TPs are associated with an alteration of the modular motor control without affecting the dimensionality of motor modules for each individual and reciprocal inhibition.
肌筋膜触发点（TP）在研究和临床实践中构成了一个难题，因为它们的病因尚未确定。一些研究调查了一个或几个肌肉，表明无论是活跃的还是潜伏的 TP 都会导致肌肉活动增加，然而，TP 对伸手任务中模块运动控制的影响尚不清楚。在伸手任务中，从肩带和上臂的肌肉记录肌电图信号，并用非负矩阵分解算法对其进行分解。提取的运动模块矩阵和激活信号用于将肌肉状态标记为主导或非主导。用手动检查在每个肌肉中检测到潜伏和活跃的 TP。尽管观察到相似的肌肉活动，但我们发现，在标记为主导状态时，具有活跃 TP 的肌肉的加权系数增加。当肌肉处于非主导状态时，没有发现影响。这些发现表明，TP 改变了运动控制，而没有协同收缩模式。作为初步证据，本研究结果表明，在存在 TP 的情况下，加权系数的增加与模块化运动控制的改变有关，而不会影响每个个体的运动模块的维度和交互抑制。
