Carranza Erick, Franovic Sreten, Boos Amy, Pirondini Elvira
Rehab and Neural Engineering Laboratory, University of Pittsburgh, 3520 Fifth Avenue, Suite 300, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, United States of America.
Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh, 151 Benedum Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, United States of America.
J Neural Eng. 2025 Apr 7;22(2). doi: 10.1088/1741-2552/adc6bc.
Voluntary control of motor actions requires precise regulation of proprioceptive and somatosensory functions. While aging is known to impair sensory processing, its effect on proprioception remains unclear. Previous studies report conflicting findings on whether passive proprioception (i.e. during externally driven movements) declines with age, and research on age-related changes in active proprioception (i.e. during voluntary movements) remains limited, particularly in the upper limb. Understanding these changes is critical for identifying and preventing impairments that may affect movement performance and mobility, particularly in neurological conditions such as stroke or Parkinson's disease.We refined a robotic protocol to assess upper-limb active proprioception and validated its robustness and reliability over multiple sessions. Using this protocol, we compared the performance between young and elderly neurologically healthy adults during both active and passive proprioceptive tasks.Elderly participants exhibited a significant decline in accuracy when sensing limb position in both active and passive proprioceptive tasks, whereas their precision remained unchanged. These findings indicate that aging primarily affects proprioceptive accuracy rather than variability in position sense.Our findings contribute to the ongoing debate on age-related proprioceptive decline and highlight the importance of distinguishing between active and passive proprioception. Furthermore, our validated robotic protocol provides a reliable tool for assessing proprioception, with potential applications in studying neurological conditions in clinical settings.
对运动动作的自主控制需要对本体感觉和躯体感觉功能进行精确调节。虽然已知衰老会损害感觉处理,但它对本体感觉的影响仍不清楚。先前的研究对于被动本体感觉(即在外部驱动运动期间)是否会随着年龄增长而下降存在相互矛盾的发现,而关于主动本体感觉(即在自主运动期间)与年龄相关变化的研究仍然有限,尤其是在上肢方面。了解这些变化对于识别和预防可能影响运动表现和活动能力的损伤至关重要,特别是在中风或帕金森病等神经系统疾病中。我们改进了一种机器人方案来评估上肢主动本体感觉,并在多个测试环节中验证了其稳健性和可靠性。使用该方案,我们比较了年轻和年长的神经系统健康成年人在主动和被动本体感觉任务中的表现。老年参与者在主动和被动本体感觉任务中感知肢体位置时,准确性显著下降,而其精确性保持不变。这些发现表明,衰老主要影响本体感觉准确性,而非位置感觉的变异性。我们的发现为正在进行的关于与年龄相关的本体感觉下降的争论做出了贡献,并强调了区分主动和被动本体感觉的重要性。此外,我们经过验证的机器人方案为评估本体感觉提供了一个可靠的工具,在临床环境中研究神经系统疾病方面具有潜在应用价值。