Vermette Marie Julie, Paré Emmeline, Prince François, Messier Julie
School of Kinesiology and Physical Activity Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Université de Montréal, 2100 Boul. Édouard-Montpetit, Montréal, Québec, H3T 1J4, Canada.
Montreal University Institute of Geriatrics Research Center, 4545 Chemin Queen-Mary, Montréal, Québec, H3W 1W5, Canada.
Geroscience. 2025 Mar 26. doi: 10.1007/s11357-025-01609-6.
Ankle proprioception and attentional resources are crucial for maintaining balance and safely driving. However, research exploring the age-related integrity of ankle proprioception has yielded conflicting results, while the attentional demand of proprioceptive processing in seniors remains underexplored. We investigated how aging affects the interaction between proprioception and attention in healthy sedentary adults using a novel dual-task paradigm. Sedentary old and young adults performed an ipsilateral proprioceptive-matching task with a long target encoding time and a cognitive-attentional subtraction task. These tasks were performed alone (single-task) or simultaneously (dual-task). Older adults showed significantly lower ankle proprioceptive accuracy and consistency in dorsiflexion compared to young adults under the single-task condition. Hence, the matching inaccuracies of seniors were more pronounced relative to young adults, when performing the proprioceptive and cognitive-attentional tasks simultaneously. Importantly, both age groups demonstrated similar cognitive performance in the single-task. However, while younger adults maintained their performance during dual-tasking, seniors showed markedly lower cognitive-attentional scores in the dual compared to the single-task condition. Thus, their dual-task costs were higher than those of young adults. Our findings of impaired ankle proprioception in sedentary older adults in the single-task underline the importance of controlling participants' physical lifestyles and demonstrate that this novel paradigm is highly sensitive to age-related proprioceptive changes. Furthermore, the substantial decline in both proprioceptive and cognitive performance during dual-tasking suggests that sedentary older adults mobilize increasingly large cognitive-attentional resources to process proprioception. This dual-task paradigm may serve as a useful biomarker to predict falls and driving accidents in older populations.
踝关节本体感觉和注意力资源对于维持平衡及安全驾驶至关重要。然而，探索踝关节本体感觉与年龄相关完整性的研究结果相互矛盾，而老年人本体感觉处理的注意力需求仍未得到充分研究。我们使用一种新颖的双任务范式，研究了衰老如何影响健康久坐成年人的本体感觉与注意力之间的相互作用。久坐的老年人和年轻人进行了一项同侧本体感觉匹配任务，该任务具有较长的目标编码时间以及一项认知注意力减法任务。这些任务单独执行（单任务）或同时执行（双任务）。在单任务条件下，与年轻人相比，老年人在背屈时的踝关节本体感觉准确性和一致性显著降低。因此，在同时执行本体感觉和认知注意力任务时，老年人的匹配误差相对于年轻人更为明显。重要的是，两个年龄组在单任务中的认知表现相似。然而，虽然年轻人在双任务执行过程中保持了他们的表现，但与单任务条件相比，老年人在双任务中的认知注意力得分明显更低。因此，他们的双任务成本高于年轻人。我们在单任务中发现久坐的老年人踝关节本体感觉受损，这突出了控制参与者身体生活方式的重要性，并表明这种新颖的范式对与年龄相关的本体感觉变化高度敏感。此外，在双任务执行过程中本体感觉和认知表现的大幅下降表明，久坐的老年人调动越来越多的认知注意力资源来处理本体感觉。这种双任务范式可能作为一种有用的生物标志物，用于预测老年人群中的跌倒和驾驶事故。
