Karimi Fatemeh, Niu Jiansheng, Almeida Quincy, Jiang Ning
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2020 Jul;2020:2857-2860. doi: 10.1109/EMBC44109.2020.9176000.
Parkinson's disease (PD) is a complex neurode-generative disorder that results into poverty of movements. Freezing of gait (FOG) is a common and severely incapacitating symptom of PD. However, the underlying neurophysiological mechanism of FOG is still unclear. Electroencephalogram (EEG) as a non-invasive brain signal measurement method has been repeatedly used to reveal the pathological reasons behind PD. Since PD affects movement abilities, one particular type of EEG pattern called Movement-related cortical potential (MRCP), which was shown to be related to the generation of movement intention, can be a useful tool in PD research. However, most MRCP studies in PD area focus on the upper-limb movement like finger movement, to the best knowledge of the authors, no study explored MRCP characteristics during lower extremity movement in PD patients, particularly PD patients with FOG. This paper intends to investigate the relationship between the characteristics of MRCP and FOG by comparing MRCP signals among three groups: healthy controls group, PD patients without FOG group, and PD patients with FOG group. These three groups of participants were recruited based on age-matching and gender proportion matching criteria. During the experiment, the Electromyography (EMG) from the tibialis anterior (TA) muscle and EEG were recorded when performing ankle dorsiflexion (AD) by the dominant foot. MRCP signals were extracted from EEG data based on the muscle activities in the TA muscle of the dominant foot. The results of this study show that, during lower limb activities, MRCP shares considerable similarities between PD patients and healthy participants. However, the amplitude of MRCP in PD patients (with and without FOG) is lower compared to the healthy participants. In addition, direct observations from the results show that MRCP from PD patients with FOG has higher amplitude but more variability in terms of amplitude and latency than those from PD patients without FOG.
帕金森病（PD）是一种复杂的神经退行性疾病，会导致运动迟缓。冻结步态（FOG）是帕金森病常见且严重致残的症状。然而，FOG潜在的神经生理机制仍不清楚。脑电图（EEG）作为一种非侵入性脑信号测量方法，已被反复用于揭示帕金森病背后的病理原因。由于帕金森病会影响运动能力，一种被称为运动相关皮层电位（MRCP）的特定脑电图模式，被证明与运动意图的产生有关，可能是帕金森病研究中的一个有用工具。然而，据作者所知，帕金森病领域的大多数MRCP研究都集中在上肢运动，如手指运动，没有研究探讨帕金森病患者下肢运动时的MRCP特征，特别是有FOG的帕金森病患者。本文旨在通过比较三组患者的MRCP信号来研究MRCP特征与FOG之间的关系：健康对照组、无FOG的帕金森病患者组和有FOG的帕金森病患者组。这三组参与者是根据年龄匹配和性别比例匹配标准招募的。在实验过程中，当优势脚进行踝关节背屈（AD）时，记录胫骨前肌（TA）的肌电图（EMG）和脑电图。基于优势脚TA肌肉的肌肉活动，从脑电图数据中提取MRCP信号。本研究结果表明，在下肢活动期间，帕金森病患者和健康参与者的MRCP有相当多的相似之处。然而，与健康参与者相比，帕金森病患者（有和无FOG）的MRCP振幅较低。此外，结果的直接观察表明，有FOG的帕金森病患者的MRCP振幅较高，但在振幅和潜伏期方面比无FOG的帕金森病患者更具变异性。
