Objective: Verify the association of inhibitory control on anticipatory postural adjustments (APA) during a conflictual step initiation task in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD).

Background: The phase that prepares the individual to step depends on high cognitive processing involving inhibitory control to adjust the step to the changes in the environment. Wrong direction of APA could lead to errors during step. Therefore, the central nervous system needs to inhibit inadequate preparation, allowing for an effective step. People with PD show impairments in APA such as direction errors, delay and APA duration, which could be associated with disorders in the cognitive inhibitory control. We hypothesized that the individuals with the worst performance in the Stroop test would also experience greater delays and amounts of errors during a conflictual step initiation.

Method: Ten volunteers diagnosed with idiopathic PD were recruited. They were submitted to the cognitive control Stroop test I / II / III, which aims to evaluate the inhibitory control and the attentional process. Participants performed the step initiation based on the Flanker task, with the purpose of evaluating the executive inhibition control in a congruent and incongruent condition. Spearman’s correlation coefficients were calculated between the Stroop scale and the parameters of the step initiation task (errors, APA onset and APA duration).

Results: The results showed a negative correlation in the Stroop I/II or III?, with APA onset in the congruent condition (rho = -0.82, p = 0.010) and in the incongruous condition (rho = -0.83, p = 0.008). Results also showed in the test of words with delay in the beginning of the APA (rho = -0.75, p = 0.025) and in the time of the APA (rho = -0.72, p = 0.037).

Conclusion: An association was found between cognitive and motor performance. It was concluded that cognitive processes must be taken into account both for the assessment of the patient and for his rehabilitation.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/relation-between-cognitive-inhibitory-control-and-anticipatory-postural-adjustment-during-a-conflictual-step-initiation-task-in-parkinsons-disease-individuals/