Skip to main content
Download PDF

Volume 7 Supplement 1

4th Congress of the International Foot and Ankle Biomechanics Community

  • Meeting abstract
  • Open access
  • Published:

The effect of cognitive task on ankle movement variability in athletes with Functional Ankle Instability

Journal of Foot and Ankle Research volume 7, Article number: A90 (2014) Cite this article

Background

Gait has been generally viewed as a largely automated motor task, requiring minimal higher-level cognitive input. Increasing evidence, however, suggest that attention demanding cognitive tasks to disturb gait[1, 2]. Movement variability may influence joint stability and increase the risk of “giving way” at the ankle in individuals with functional ankle instability (FAI)[3]. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of dual-tasking on ankle movement variability in athletes with FAI.

Methods

21 athletes (age 25.57±4.77 years) with clinically diagnosed FAI were recruited. All participants completed 5 trials of normal walking and 5 trials of normal walking while performing a cognitive task. The cognitive task consisted of subtracting seven from a randomly selected number between 11 and 99 repeatedly whilst walking. Three dimensional rotations of the affected ankle (measured by an eight-camera motion capture system at 100 Hz) were calculated by visual3D during gait cycles. Between trials variability of ankle rotations time curves during stance phase and during 200ms before and after heel strike were calculated using the coefficient of multiple correlations (CMC) and intraclass correlation (ICC)

Results

The results indicate that mean CMC was decreased during dual task condition in the sagittal and frontal planes. This was statistically significant in frontal plane during 200ms before and after heel strike (p<0.05) (Table 1). There was reduction in ICC magnitude in dual-task condition compared to single task in 200ms before heel strike (Table 2).

Table 1 Mean CMC during different conditions and periods of time.
Full size table
Table 2 ICC in 3planes during different conditions
Full size table

Conclusion

The athletes with FAI demonstrated greater ankle movement variability during dual task condition which may indicate diminished neuromotor control. Cognitive load may increase episodes of ankle instability in these athletes.

References

  1. Abbud GA, Li KZ, DeMont RG: Attentional requirements of walking according to the gait phase and onset of auditory stimuli. Gait & posture. 2009, 30 (2): 227-32. 10.1016/j.gaitpost.2009.05.013.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Al-Yahya E, Dawes H, Smith L, Dennis A, Howells K, Cockburn J: Cognitive motor interference while walking: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews. 2011, 35 (3): 715-28. 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.08.008.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Brown CN, Padua DA, Marshall SW, Guskiewicz KM: Variability of motion in individuals with mechanical or functional ankle instability during a stop jump maneuver. Clinical biomechanics. 2009, Bristol, Avon, 24 (9): 762-8. 10.1016/j.clinbiomech.2009.07.001.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Musculoskeletal Research Centre, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Iran

    Sanam Tavakoli, Saeed Forghany, Akram Jamali & Khadijeh Bapirzadeh

  2. Centre for Health Sciences Research, University of Salford, UK

    Saeed Forghany & Christopher Nester

Authors
  1. Sanam Tavakoli
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Saeed Forghany
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Christopher Nester
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Akram Jamali
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Khadijeh Bapirzadeh
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Saeed Forghany.

Additional information

Competing interests

Nester declares a personal commercial interest in the insoles tested in this study.

Rights and permissions

Open Access  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Tavakoli, S., Forghany, S., Nester, C. et al. The effect of cognitive task on ankle movement variability in athletes with Functional Ankle Instability. J Foot Ankle Res 7 (Suppl 1), A90 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/1757-1146-7-S1-A90

Download citation

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1757-1146-7-S1-A90

Keywords

Journal of Foot and Ankle Research

ISSN: 1757-1146