VvBN Dissertation Prize 2019 Video Blog Entry Chris McCrum - Walking Stability in Older Adults

Hello my name is Chris McCrum and this is my video blog entry for the 2019 VvBN Proefschriftprijs (Dissertation Prize). In this video I will summarize some of the main points of my thesis: “A trip to remember: assessing and improving walking stability in older adults”. Falls among older adults are unfortunately a common occurrence. Over the age of 65, approximately one in three older adults will fall in a single year. Over the age of 80, there’s an increase to approximately one in two.

These falls most often occur during walking, usually due to sudden 00:31 - balance disturbances such as trips and slips. My overall aim was therefore to gain more understanding of how old age affects walking stability and adaptability in order to inform research and applications in the field of fall prevention. Here you can see some examples of the tasks that we’ve used in our studies to do this, from sudden unexpected perturbations as you see on the left to sustained resistance perturbations seen on the right. Overall, my results showed that the ability to adapt walking following balance loss is preserved with ageing but how quickly adaptation can occur may decline with ageing. Some of the results also indicate that the extent of adaptation or transfer that occurs during these tasks might reflect a necessity and not necessarily superior adaptability.

For example, we found that 01:18 - older adults could successfully transfer stability improvements from the perturbation-trained leg to an untrained leg and we did not see this in young adults. However, this probably reflects a greater need for the transfer in older adults rather than the older adults having superior adaptability. Regarding recommendations for the future, here we can see a typical progression in balance training or testing where the challenge is gradually increased. However, the specificity to falls prevention here is limited, because the act of stepping is missing, whether that be walking on an uneven surface or a large balance recovery step and its this direction that we really need to work towards in research and applied settings by continuing to develop knowledge and safe and effective protocols. Thank you very much for watching this video blog summary of my thesis. If you want to know more, please get in touch .