Assessing Motor Adaptation Following Adolescent Sport-Related Concussion
Date
2024-07-03
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Abstract
Concussion is a mild traumatic brain injury that is common for adolescents participating in sports. Sport-related concussion can be acquired through biomechanically diverse mechanisms of injury, leading to diverse damage to the brain that can result in cognitive, sensorimotor, and/or vestibular impairments. Currently there are no gold standard tools for clinicians to use when diagnosing, managing, and making clearance to play decisions following sport-related concussion. When examining individuals following suspected concussion and when making clearance decisions to play, we postulated that an assessment task that engages distributed, global brain networks to capture concussion-related neurological impairments would be useful. Motor adaptation is a brain function important for sport participation that requires engagement of sensory, motor, cognitive, and association regions of the brain, leading us test this brain function. This thesis examined motor adaptation impairments in adolescents at two timepoints: within 10 days postinjury (Experiment 1), and after obtaining medical clearance to return to sports (Experiment 2). Group level differences in all tested task parameters were seen within 10 days of sport-related concussion, with approximately one-in-four participants exhibiting overall impairments in motor adaptation. When medical clearance to return to play was granted, group level differences were no longer seen compared to healthy controls. However, approximately one-in-four participants who were medically cleared exhibited overall impairments in motor adaptation. Taken together, our results suggest that motor adaptation may be a valuable brain function to assess during the clinical management of sport-related concussion, especially given the relevance of motor adaptation within sport. Further, robotic tools were shown to be capable of detecting subtle neurological deficits after sport-related concussion.
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Keywords
Robotics, Sport-Related Concussion, Adolescent, Motor Adaptation
Citation
Stuart, D. W. (2024). Assessing motor adaptation following adolescent sport-related concussion (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.