Toe walking is a gait deviation with multiple etiologies and often associated with premature and prolonged ankle plantar flexor electromyographic activity. The goal of this study was to use a detailed musculoskeletal model and forward dynamical simulations that emulate able-bodied toe and heel-toe walking to understand why, despite an increase in muscle activity in the ankle plantar flexors dur...

AIM The aim of this paper was to determine whether the injection of alcohol or phenol into the tibialis posterior nerve relive the symptoms and signs of ankle plantar flexor spasticity. METHODS Twenty patients with hemiplegic stroke were included. Patients were randomly assigned to receive a single treatment of alcohol or phenol injection to the motor branches of tibial nerve. Clinical outcom...

[Purpose] The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of task-specific plantar flexor training on walking ability indices in a patient with a paretic ankle. [Subject and Methods] The subject was a 65-year-old male patient with right hemiplegia due to a left medullary ventral infarction. An ABA' single-subject design was adopted. The independent variable was a task-specific plantar flex...

Background: Spasticity is one of the most important symptoms of stroke, which leads to movement constraints and disability. The presence of spasticity in the ankle and toe plantar flexor muscles disturbs the balance and gait of patients with stroke. Dry needling has been introduced as a new method for the treatment of spasticity. The aim of this study was to investigate the immediate effects of...

In previous investigations (Kugelberg, Eklund, and Grimby, 1960; Grimby, 1963a, b) the spinal part of the human plantar reflex in normal and pathological cases was studied by means of electromyographic techniques. Special attention was paid to the reflex patterns obtained during simultaneous recordings from the short hallux flexor and extensor, since the strength of the electrical response in t...

Experiments have shown that elastic ankle exoskeletons can be used to reduce ankle joint and plantar-flexor muscle loading when hopping in place and, in turn, reduce metabolic energy consumption. However, recent experimental work has shown that such exoskeletons cause less favourable soleus (SO) muscle-tendon mechanics than is observed during normal hopping, which might limit the capacity of th...

We developed a powered ankle-foot orthosis that uses artificial pneumatic muscles to produce active plantar flexor torque. The purpose of this study was to quantify the mechanical performance of the orthosis during human walking. Three subjects walked at a range of speeds wearing ankle-foot orthoses with either one or two artificial muscles working in parallel. The orthosis produced similar tot...

BACKGROUND Despite inadequate empirical validation, sit-to-stand (STS) performance is often used as a proxy measure of lower limb strength among older adults. Furthermore, the relationships between bilateral isokinetic hip, knee, and ankle joint strength and their contributions to STS performances among older adults have not been established. The authors evaluated these relationships on 2 STS t...

BACKGROUND The aims of this study were to investigate the relationships between the maximum isometric toe flexor muscle strength (TFS) and cross-sectional area (CSA) of the plantar intrinsic and extrinsic muscles and to identify the major determinant of maximum TFS among CSA of the plantar intrinsic and extrinsic muscles. METHODS Twenty six young healthy participants (14 men, 12 women; age, 2...