Handwriting speed and size in individuals with Parkinson’s disease compared to healthy controls: the possible effect of cueing

Changes in handwriting are common in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Improving motor performance by using cueing strategies has become a standard in PD physiotherapy. The objective of the study was to identify whether using different paper types (plain, horizontal lined and grid lined) can improve handwriting of individuals with PD. 21 subjects with mild-to-moderate PD and 9 healthy control group members participated. Subjects were given the task of writing two repetitions of one simple and one complex sentence on plain, horizontal lined and grid lined paper. Handwriting speed and size were measured. Results confirm previous findings stating that individuals with PD write slower and have smaller handwriting compared to healthy controls. Based on the study, it can be concluded that writing on different types of paper does not affect writing speed, but does affect handwriting size of patients with PD

Gait parameters of individuals with Parkinson disease decline during one-year period

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease, influencing mainly elderly. The key motor factor affecting the level of participation in activities of daily living is the gait function, which is known to be progressively impaired in PD. However, gait characteristics also worsen due to normal aging. The main aim of this study was to investigate whether gait parameters decline in individuals with PD in an interval of one year compared to healthy elderly. Selected gait characteristics were recorded using 3-D optoelectronic movement analysis system ELITE in 13 patients with mild-to-moderate PD and 13 age- and gender-matched controls. Hoehn and Yahr Scale and Unified Parkinson Disease Rating Scale were used for clinical assessment. It was found that PD patients walk with significantly shorter steps and stride and reduced gait speed. In one year, the stride length initiated with right foot and stride walk ratio further decrease in PD patients. On re-evaluation the percentages of stance, swing and double support phase differed significantly between groups. In second measurement, control subjects walked with reduced step width. It was concluded that gait speed and stride length decline in patients with PD in a period of one year, whereas no indication of deterioration of gait function is evident in healthy controls

Comparison of One- Two- and Three- Dimensional CNN models for Drawing-Test-Based Diagnostics of the Parkinson's Disease

Subject: In this article, convolutional networks of one, two, and three dimensions are compared with respect to their ability to distinguish between the drawing tests produced by Parkinson's disease patients and healthy control subjects. Motivation: The application of deep learning techniques for the analysis of drawing tests to support the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease has become a growing trend in the area of Artificial Intelligence. Method: The dynamic features of the handwriting signal are embedded in the static test data to generate one-dimensional time series, two-dimensional RGB images and three-dimensional voxelized point clouds, and then one-, two-, and three-dimensional CNN can be used to automatically extract features for effective diagnosis. Novelty: While there are many results that describe the application of two-dimensional convolutional models to the problem, to the best knowledge of the authors, there are no results based on the application of three-dimensional models and very few using one-dimensional models. Main result: The accuracy of the one-, two- and three-dimensional CNN models was 62.50%, 77.78% and 83.34% in the DraWritePD dataset (acquired by the authors) and 73.33%, 80.00% and 86.67% in the PaHaW dataset (well known from the literature), respectively. For these two data sets, the proposed three-dimensional convolutional classification method exhibits the best diagnostic performance

Functional Performance and Associations between Performance Tests and Neurological Assessment Differ in Men and Women with Parkinson’s Disease

Background. Neurological assessment of a patient with Parkinson’s disease (PD) is expected to reflect upon functional performance. As women are known to report more limitations even for same observed functional performance level, present study was designed to examine whether associations between neurological assessments and functional performance differ across genders. Methods. 14 men and 14 women with PD participated. Functional performance was assessed by measuring walking speeds on 10-meter walk test (10MWT) and by performing timed-up-and-go-test (TUG). Neurological assessment included Hoehn and Yahr Scale (HY), Movement Disorders Society Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS), Schwab and England Activities of Daily Living Scale (S-E), and Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE). Results. In women with PD, Kendall’s tau-b correlation analyses revealed significant correlations between functional performance tests and neurological assessment measures, with the exception in MMSE. No corresponding associations were found for men, although they demonstrated better functional performance, as expected. Conclusion. Men in similar clinical stage of the PD perform better on functional tests than women. Disease severity reflects upon functional performance differently in men and women with PD. Results indicate that when interpreting the assessment results of both functional performance and neurological assessment tests, the gender of the patient should be taken into consideration

Microsoft Kinect-based differences in lower limb kinematics during modified timed up and go test phases between men with and without Parkinson’s disease

The aim of the study was to analyse with Microsoft Kinect (Kinect) the differences in lower limb kinematics during sub-phases of modified Timed Up and Go test (modTUG) in men with Parkinson’s disease (PD) compared to healthy age-matched male individuals. Eight men with mild-to-moderate PD (age 67.5±4.5 yrs) and eight healthy men (age 69.8±8.0 yrs) participated. Kinect along with KinectPsyManager (v1.0) and Matlab2016b software was used for data collection. Selected lower limb kinematics and gait speed (GS) were calculated during sittingto- walking (STW) transition while performing modTUG. According to Kinect men with mild to moderate PD did not differ from healthy counterparts in aspects of postural characteristics of STW, with the exception of smaller distance between knees while sitting (p<0.001). Men with PD were found to perform the walking phase of STW transition slower (p<0.01) and with slower GS (p<0.01) comparing to healthy men. In conclusion, compared to healthy men, Kinect detects smaller distance between knees during sitting before transitioning from STW in men with mild to moderate PD. In addition, men with PD also demonstrated slower GS and a longer walking phase of STW transition in comparison to healthy men.

THE EFFECTS OF SODIUM CITRATE INGESTION ON METABOLISM AND 1500-M RACING TIME IN TRAINED FEMALE RUNNERS

The purpose of the study was to assess the effects of sodium citrate ingestion on the metabolic response to exercise and performance in a 1500-m competitive run in trained female middle-distance runners in field conditions. Seventeen athletes (mean (± SD) aged 18.6 ± 2.5 years, VO2max 55.2 ± 7.6 ml·kg-1·min-1) competed in two 1500-m races following ingestion of 0.4 g·kg-1 body mass of sodium citrate (CIT) and placebo (PLC - 1.0% solution of NaCl). The two substances, CIT and PLC were administered in 800 ml of solution in a randomly assigned double-blind crossover manner. Capillary blood samples were analysed for lactate, glucose, haemoglobin and haematocrit before administering the solutions (baseline) as well as before and after both 1500-m races. The athletes' times for trials CIT and PLC were 321.4 ± 26.4 and 317.4 ± 22.5 s, respectively (p > 0.05). A greater relative increase in plasma volume after administering the experimental solution, an increased body mass (by 0.4 kg; p = 0.006) immediately before the race and a restrained increase in blood glucose concentration (by 2.5 ± 1.2 mmol·l-1 vs 3.4 ± 0.8 mmol·l-1; p = 0.002) during the race were observed in the CIT trial compared to the PLC. A significant relationship was observed between body mass of the subjects immediately before the race and performance time (r = 0.374; p = 0.029). There were no between-treatment differences in heart rate in any stage of the run or in blood lactate accumulation during the race (final concentration of lactate was 14.4 ± 3.0 mmol·l-1 and 13.4 ± 2.5 mmol·l-1 (p > 0.05) in the CIT and PLC trials, respectively). The results suggest that sodium citrate induces an increase in water retention before exercise and may modify carbohydrate metabolism in high intensity running, but does not improve performance in 1500-m competitive run in female middle-distance runner

A light-weight CNN model for efficient Parkinson's disease diagnostics

In recent years, deep learning methods have achieved great success in various fields due to their strong performance in practical applications. In this paper, we present a light-weight neural network for Parkinson's disease diagnostics, in which a series of hand-drawn data are collected to distinguish Parkinson's disease patients from healthy control subjects. The proposed model consists of a convolution neural network (CNN) cascading to long-short-term memory (LSTM) to adapt the characteristics of collected time-series signals. To make full use of their advantages, a multilayered LSTM model is firstly used to enrich features which are then concatenated with raw data and fed into a shallow one-dimensional (1D) CNN model for efficient classification. Experimental results show that the proposed model achieves a high-quality diagnostic result over multiple evaluation metrics with much fewer parameters and operations, outperforming conventional methods such as support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), lightgbm (LGB) and CNN-based methods