PMID: 10727698: Practice improves motor performance in PD

[janet paterson <janet313@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Practice as an intervention to improve speeded motor performance and motor 
learning in Parkinson's disease.

Individuals with Parkinson's disease have difficulty initiating and performing 
complex, sequential movements.

Practice generally leads to faster initiation and execution of movements in 
healthy adults, however, whether practice similarly improves motor performance 
in patients with Parkinson's disease remains controversial.

To assess the effects of practice on motor performance, patients with 
Parkinson's disease and control subjects practiced two, rapid arm-reaching 
tasks with different levels of movement complexity for 120 trials each over 2 
days.

Response programming was studied by analyzing the overall reaction time latency 
of each movement and its fractionated sub-components, premotor and motor time.

Practice effects were investigated by comparing pretest performance to 
immediate and delayed retention test performances (10-min and 48-h rest 
intervals, respectively).

Both patients with Parkinson's disease and control subjects improved speeded 
performance of sequential targeting tasks by practice and retained the 
improvement across both retention test intervals.

Finding a learning effect for persons with Parkinson's disease supports 
practice as an effective rehabilitation strategy to improve motor performance 
of specific tasks for patients with Parkinson's disease.


J Neurol Sci 2000 Mar 15;174(2):127-136
Behrman AL, Cauraugh JH, Light KE
Department of Physical Therapy, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

PMID: 10727698

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janet paterson
53 now / 41 dx / 37 onset
a new voice: 
613 256 8340 PO Box 171 Almonte Ontario Canada K0A 1A0