MAPS-PD version 1
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Pilot study investigating motor adaptation in people with Parkinson’s disease, REM-sleep behaviour disorder patients and healthy controls using reaching and walking tasks
IRAS ID
214510
Contact name
Alan Whone
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
North Bristol Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 6 months, 0 days
Research summary
This pilot work aims to assess human motor plasticity through motor adaptation tasks. Even an apparently simple task such as reaching to grasp an object is computationally complex and subject to errors. To compensate and correct for these errors the nervous system employs a ubiquitous and fundamental process of motor adaptation (MA). However, motor plasticity can fail and this has a profound impact on the ability to generate goal-directed movements. Our key hypothesis is that patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) use motor plasticity to compensate for the loss of dopaminergic neurones. We have designed a set of experimental tasks that provide a way to study motor plasticity in unimpaired human participants and patients with PD. We will focus on MA across these different experiments; defined as our ability to learn to adapt a movement to reach a desired goal in the face of changes in the environment. This type of error-based motor learning is fundamentally important for the performance of accurate movements.
The core tasks are: (1) manual reaching and (2) walking. We will measure the rate and nature of MA across these tasks in response to (i) motor perturbation and (ii) visual perturbation. For reaching we will use a point to target task with a visual perturbation using prisms: a method we have used previously with stroke patients (Turton et al 2010). And we will also use a method by which we attach elastic to the arm to produce a lateral perturbation during reaching. For walking we will use Virtual Reality to perturb vision within Bristol’s BVI Movement Lab and for a motor perturbation we will add weights to one leg. All four tasks are experimentally tractable in both patients and controls.REC name
South Central - Oxford C Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
16/SC/0678
Date of REC Opinion
15 Dec 2016
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion