The effects of startle and non-startle auditory stimuli on wrist flexion movement in Parkinson's disease

•We investigated the effect of startle and non-startle stimuli in Parkinson's patients.•Startle reaction effect for upper limb movements is unimpaired in PD patients.•Startle and non-startle stimuli have different reation time effects in PD patients. Startle stimuli lead to shorter reaction tim...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neuroscience letters 2013-08, Vol.548, p.56-60
Main Authors: Fernandez-Del-Olmo, Miguel, Bello, Olalla, Lopez-Alonso, Virginia, Marquez, G., Sanchez, Jose A., Morenilla, Luis, Valls-Solé, Josep
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustic Stimulation - methods
Adult
Aged
Cues
Female
Humans
Intersensory facilitation
Male
Middle Aged
Movement
Parkinson
Parkinson Disease - physiopathology
Reaction Time
Reflex, Startle
Startle
Wrist flexion
Wrist Joint - physiopathology
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:•We investigated the effect of startle and non-startle stimuli in Parkinson's patients.•Startle reaction effect for upper limb movements is unimpaired in PD patients.•Startle and non-startle stimuli have different reation time effects in PD patients. Startle stimuli lead to shorter reaction times in control subjects and Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. However, non-startle stimuli also enhance movement initiation in PD. We wanted to examine whether a startle-triggered movement would retain similar kinematic and EMG-related characteristics compared to one induced by a non-startle external cue in PD patients. In this study we investigated the electromyography pattern and the reaction time during a wrist flexion movement in response to three different stimuli: a visual imperative stimulus; visual stimulus simultaneous with a non-startle auditory stimulus and with a startle auditory stimulus. Ten PD patients and ten aged matched controls participated in this study. The reaction times were faster for startle and non-startle stimuli in comparison with the visual imperative stimulus, in both patients and control subjects. The startle cue induced a faster reaction than the non-startle cue. The electromyography pattern remained unchanged across the conditions. The results suggest that the startle reaction effect for upper limb movements are unimpaired in PD patients and has different characteristics than the effect of non-startle stimuli.
ISSN:0304-3940
1872-7972
DOI:10.1016/j.neulet.2013.05.069