Clinical and Laboratory Based Proprioceptive Assessments in Older Adults and People with Multiple Sclerosis

Abstract

Proprioception is the sense of body position in space (Gilman, 2002; Goble, Coxon, et al., 2012), and can be evaluated using both clinical assessments and laboratory based tasks. To date, normal aging has been shown to lead to a decline in proprioceptive acuity as assessed via laboratory based proprioceptive matching tasks, while proprioceptive deficits have been assumed to be present in people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS) based on performance on clinical assessments. The objective of the current study was to determine if performance on clinical assessments and laboratory based proprioceptive matching tasks is similar across older adults (OA) and PwMS (Adamo et al., 2007; Goble, 2010; Herter et al., 2014; Jamali et al., 2017; Khan et al., 2018; Scherder et al., 2018). Twenty-four OA participants (70+ years old) and twenty PwMS from the Ottawa community were recruited to take part in this study. Proprioceptive sense was assessed using clinical assessments (i.e., superficial sensation, vibration sense and joint position sense) and laboratory based proprioceptive matching tasks. Analysis revealed that while OA performed better on the clinical assessments, PwMS were more accurate in the laboratory matching tasks. Furthermore, analysis of goal directed movements in the matching tasks, revealed that PwMS spent more time in the initial, planning stage of the movement compared to OA, who spent more time executing their movements. These results indicate that OA and PwMS do not demonstrate similar deficits across clinical assessments and laboratory based proprioceptive tasks, and in fact plan and execute their movements differently. Moreover, results also call into question the relationship between clinical and laboratory based assessments of proprioception.