Buyle Margot, Azoidou Viktoria, Pavlou Marousa, Van Rompaey Vincent, Bamiou Doris-Eva
Experimental Laboratory of Translational Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine, Centre for Human & Applied Physiological Sciences, King's College London, London, United Kingdom.
Front Neurol. 2021 Feb 9;12:634395. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2021.634395. eCollection 2021.
The ageing process may degrade an individual's balance control, hearing capacity, and cognitive function. Older adults perform worse on simultaneously executed balance and secondary tasks (i.e., dual-task performance) than younger adults and may be more vulnerable to auditory distraction. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of passive listening on functional gait in healthy older vs. younger adults, and to investigate the effect of age, functional gait, hearing ability and cognitive functioning on dual-task performance. Twenty young and 20 older healthy adults were recruited. Functional gait (Functional Gait Assessment in silent and noisy condition), hearing function (audiogram; Speech in Babble test), and cognitive ability (Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery) were measured. Overall, a significant difference between functional gait performance in silent vs. noisy conditions was found ( = 0.022), with no significant difference in dual-task cost between the two groups ( = 0.11). Correlations were found between increasing age, worse functional gait performance, poorer hearing capacity and lower performance on cognitive function tasks. Interestingly, worse performance on attention tasks appeared to be associated with a worse functional gait performance in the noisy condition. Passive listening to multi-talker babble noise can affect functional gait in both young and older adults. This effect could result from the cognitive load of the babble noise, due to the engagement of attention networks by the unattended speech.
衰老过程可能会降低个体的平衡控制能力、听力和认知功能。与年轻人相比，老年人在同时执行平衡任务和次要任务（即双任务表现）时表现更差，并且可能更容易受到听觉干扰。本研究的目的是确定被动聆听对健康老年人和年轻人功能性步态的影响，并研究年龄、功能性步态、听力能力和认知功能对双任务表现的影响。招募了20名年轻和20名老年健康成年人。测量了功能性步态（安静和嘈杂条件下的功能性步态评估）、听力功能（听力图；嘈杂环境中的言语测试）和认知能力（剑桥神经心理测试自动成套测验）。总体而言，发现安静与嘈杂条件下的功能性步态表现存在显著差异（ = 0.022），两组之间的双任务成本无显著差异（ = 0.11）。发现年龄增长、功能性步态表现变差、听力能力较差和认知功能任务表现较低之间存在相关性。有趣的是，在嘈杂条件下，注意力任务表现较差似乎与功能性步态表现较差有关。被动聆听多说话者的嘈杂噪声会影响年轻人和老年人的功能性步态。这种影响可能是由于嘈杂噪声的认知负荷，因为未被注意的言语会使注意力网络参与其中。
