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Task matters: an investigation on the effect of different secondary tasks on dual-task gait in older adults
BACKGROUND: Dual-task gait performance declines as humans age, leading to increased fall risk among older adults. It is unclear whether different secondary cognitive tasks mediate age-related decline in dual-task gait. This study aimed to examine how type and difficulty level of the secondary cognit...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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BioMed Central
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8465774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34563129 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12877-021-02464-8 |
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author | Goh, Hui-Ting Pearce, Miranda Vas, Asha |
author_facet | Goh, Hui-Ting Pearce, Miranda Vas, Asha |
author_sort | Goh, Hui-Ting |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Dual-task gait performance declines as humans age, leading to increased fall risk among older adults. It is unclear whether different secondary cognitive tasks mediate age-related decline in dual-task gait. This study aimed to examine how type and difficulty level of the secondary cognitive tasks differentially affect dual-task gait in older adults. METHODS: Twenty young and twenty older adults participated in this single-session study. We employed four different types of secondary tasks and each consisted of two difficulty levels, yielding eight different dual-task conditions. The dual-task conditions included walking and 1) counting backward by 3 s or by 7 s; 2) remembering a 5-item or 7-item lists; 3) responding to a simple or choice reaction time tasks; 4) generating words from single or alternated categories. Gait speed and cognitive task performance under single- and dual-task conditions were used to compute dual-task cost (DTC, %) with a greater DTC indicating a worse performance. RESULTS: A significant three-way interaction was found for the gait speed DTC (p = .04). Increased difficulty in the reaction time task significantly increased gait speed DTC for older adults (p = .01) but not for young adults (p = .90). In contrast, increased difficulty level in the counting backward task significantly increased gait speed DTC for young adults (p = .03) but not for older adults (p = .85). Both groups responded similarly to the increased task difficulty in the other two tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Older adults demonstrated a different response to dual-task challenges than young adults. Aging might have different impacts on various cognitive domains and result in distinctive dual-task gait interference patterns. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8465774 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-84657742021-09-27 Task matters: an investigation on the effect of different secondary tasks on dual-task gait in older adults Goh, Hui-Ting Pearce, Miranda Vas, Asha BMC Geriatr Research BACKGROUND: Dual-task gait performance declines as humans age, leading to increased fall risk among older adults. It is unclear whether different secondary cognitive tasks mediate age-related decline in dual-task gait. This study aimed to examine how type and difficulty level of the secondary cognitive tasks differentially affect dual-task gait in older adults. METHODS: Twenty young and twenty older adults participated in this single-session study. We employed four different types of secondary tasks and each consisted of two difficulty levels, yielding eight different dual-task conditions. The dual-task conditions included walking and 1) counting backward by 3 s or by 7 s; 2) remembering a 5-item or 7-item lists; 3) responding to a simple or choice reaction time tasks; 4) generating words from single or alternated categories. Gait speed and cognitive task performance under single- and dual-task conditions were used to compute dual-task cost (DTC, %) with a greater DTC indicating a worse performance. RESULTS: A significant three-way interaction was found for the gait speed DTC (p = .04). Increased difficulty in the reaction time task significantly increased gait speed DTC for older adults (p = .01) but not for young adults (p = .90). In contrast, increased difficulty level in the counting backward task significantly increased gait speed DTC for young adults (p = .03) but not for older adults (p = .85). Both groups responded similarly to the increased task difficulty in the other two tasks. CONCLUSIONS: Older adults demonstrated a different response to dual-task challenges than young adults. Aging might have different impacts on various cognitive domains and result in distinctive dual-task gait interference patterns. BioMed Central 2021-09-25 /pmc/articles/PMC8465774/ /pubmed/34563129 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12877-021-02464-8 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research Goh, Hui-Ting Pearce, Miranda Vas, Asha Task matters: an investigation on the effect of different secondary tasks on dual-task gait in older adults |
title | Task matters: an investigation on the effect of different secondary tasks on dual-task gait in older adults |
title_full | Task matters: an investigation on the effect of different secondary tasks on dual-task gait in older adults |
title_fullStr | Task matters: an investigation on the effect of different secondary tasks on dual-task gait in older adults |
title_full_unstemmed | Task matters: an investigation on the effect of different secondary tasks on dual-task gait in older adults |
title_short | Task matters: an investigation on the effect of different secondary tasks on dual-task gait in older adults |
title_sort | task matters: an investigation on the effect of different secondary tasks on dual-task gait in older adults |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8465774/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34563129 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12877-021-02464-8 |
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