Increased postural sway in the elderly has been viewed as a degradation of the postural control system that may be related to an increased risk of falls in the elderly [1]. This study demonstrated the degradation of postural control with aging by quantifying the changes seen in the temporal structure as well as the magnitude of movement of the center of pressure during quiet stance. The analysi...

OBJECTIVE The objective of this study was to determine the effect of non-occupational exposure to manganese (Mn) on postural balance. METHODS Residents living near a ferromanganese refinery provided hair and blood samples after postural balance testing. The relationship between hair Mn and postural balance was analyzed with logistic regression. Following covariate adjustment, postural balance...

When standing quietly, the human body is continuously moving about an upright posture in an erratic fashion. Conventional posturographic analyses that ignore structure of postural steadiness time series do not fully characterize properties of sway dynamics. Recurrence quantification analysis is a technique that can extract the dynamics of postural fluctuations through several variables. In this...

PURPOSE Evaluate the relationship between the postural alignment of the head and possible interference in the view of children. METHODS We evaluated 11 children between 2 and 7 years of age of both sexes, with the visually impaired, who had nystagmus and head lock position. The test Lea Grating Acuity Test® was used to collect measurements of visual acuity. This applied on two occasions: with...

Poor postural stability has been identified as a risk factor for lower extremity musculoskeletal injury. The additional weight of body armor carried by Soldiers alters static postural stability and may predispose Soldiers to lower extremity musculoskeletal injuries. However, static postural stability tasks poorly replicate the dynamic military environment, which places considerable stress on th...

Nonlinear analysis of standing postural control in healthy adults reveals a chaotic structure of the center of pressure time series. Independent sitting is the first controlled posture during development, and can also be examined for nonlinear dynamics. We performed a principal component analysis on variables extracted from the center of pressure (COP) time series of infants sitting independent...

This study investigated the relationship between fear of falling (FOF) and qualitative and quantitative postural control in Parkinson's disease (PD). Fifty-eight nondemented PD patients were studied along with age-matched healthy controls. The degree of FOF was estimated using the Activities-specific Balance Confidence scale. Qualitative postural control was evaluated using a component of the U...

Appropriate neuromuscular responses to support surface perturbations are crucial to prevent falls, but aging-related anatomical and physiological changes affect the appropriateness and efficiency of such responses. Low-level noise application to sensory receptors has shown to be effective for postural improvement in a variety of different balance tasks, but it is unknown whether this interventi...

How sensory organization for postural control matures in children is not clear at this time. The present study examined, in children aged 7 to 11 and in adults, the postural control modifications in quiet standing when somatosensory inputs from the ankle were disturbed. Since the reweighting of sensory inputs is not mature before 10, we hypothesized that postural stability was more affected in ...