Gait Changes as Indicator of Cognitive Health Decline

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Foot­prints to Cog­ni­tive Decline and Alzheimer’s Are Seen in Gait (The New York Times):
“The way peo­ple walk appears to speak vol­umes about the way they think, so much so that changes in an old­er person’s gait appear to be an ear­ly indi­ca­tor of cog­ni­tive impair­ment, includ­ing Alzheimer’s disease…Five stud­ies pre­sent­ed at the Alzheimer’s Asso­ci­a­tion Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence in Van­cou­ver this month pro­vide strik­ing evi­dence that when a person’s walk gets slow­er or becomes more vari­able or less con­trolled, his cog­ni­tive func­tion is also suffering…Asking peo­ple to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly per­form think­ing and move­ment tasks revealed “deficits that you can’t see with the naked eye,” Dr. Briden­baugh said. It may be that the brain is already so com­pro­mised that it can­not coor­di­nate its cir­cuits to effi­cient­ly man­age such “dual tasks.”

–> To learn more about these papers pre­sent­ed at the Alzheimer’s Asso­ci­a­tion Inter­na­tion­al Con­fer­ence, click Here.

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  • How does gait change as cog­ni­tive decline pro­gress­es in the elderly?
  • Cog­ni­tion and gait reveal dis­tinct pat­terns of asso­ci­a­tion in an aging population.
  • Slow gait pre­dicts cog­ni­tive decline: a pop­u­la­tion based cohort study
  • In Home Con­tin­u­ous Mon­i­tor­ing of Gait Speed: a sen­si­tive method for detect­ing motor slow­ing asso­ci­at­ed with small­er brain vol­umes and demen­tia risk.
  • Clin­i­cal gait assess­ment in the old-old pop­u­la­tion in a com­mu­ni­ty: The Kuri­hara Project