Anticipatory postural adjustments of gait initiation in healthy subjects: The effect of interfoot distance

摘要

Anticipatory postural adjustments (APAs) represent a feedforward organization of a coherent set of motor commands (synergistic muscular activities) that are generated in advance with respect to any observable postural change. They are considered fundamental in creating the necessary conditions to produce the forthcoming movement. This is clearly the case of gait initiation, during which the propulsive forces for obtaining the intended gait speed are generated. As the different anthropometric parameters and initial conditions can affect some features of APAs, we have investigated the specific effect of the initial interfoot distance on some APAs parameters obtained from gait initiation in healthy subjects. The objective was to understand how to remove factors that could hinder a correct comparison between patients and healthy controls.