Investigating Aging-Related Changes in the Coordination of Agonist and Antagonist Muscles Using Fuzzy Entropy and Mutual Information

Aging alters muscular coordination patterns. This study aimed to investigate aging-related changes in the coordination of agonist and antagonist muscles from two aspects, the activities of individual muscles and the inter-muscular coupling. Eighteen young subjects and 10 elderly subjects were recruited to modulate the agonist muscle activity to track a target during voluntary isometric elbow flexion and extension. Normalized muscle activation and fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn) were applied to depict the activities of biceps and triceps. Mutual information (MI) was utilized to measure the inter-muscular coupling between biceps and triceps. The agonist activation decreased and the antagonist activation increased significantly during elbow flexion and extension with aging. FuzzyEn values of agonist electromyogram (EMG) were similar between the two age groups. FuzzyEn values of antagonist EMG increased significantly with aging during elbow extension. MI decreased significantly with aging during elbow extension. These results indicated increased antagonist co-activation and decreased inter-muscular coupling with aging during elbow extension, which might result from the reduced reciprocal inhibition and the recruitment of additional cortical-spinal pathways connected to biceps. Based on FuzzyEn and MI, this study provided a comprehensive understanding of the mechanisms underlying the aging-related changes in the coordination of agonist and antagonist muscles.