Aiden Payne

PhD Proposal Presentation

Date: Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017

Time: 9:00 AM 

Location: Emory Rehabilitation Hospital (Room R101)

                  1441 Clifton Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 

Committee:

Lena Ting, PhD (Advisor, BME, GT/Emory)

Greg Hajcak, PhD (Clin. Psych., Stony Brook University)

Thomas Wichmann, MD (Emory Neurology)  

Dieter Jaegar, PhD (BME, GT/Emory)

Michael Borich, PhD/DPT (BME, GT/Emory)

Lucas McKay, PhD (BME, GT/Emory)

Cortical Mechanisms of Balance Impairment in Parkinson’s Disease

Balance impairment and cognitive impairment reduce quality of life in old age, and particularly in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Current treatments and therapies do not adequately resolve balance impairments or cognitive impairments. Although typically considered separate deficits, a strong association between impairments in balance and cognitive abilities and synergistic benefits from interventions which simultaneously target both impairments suggest that common mechanisms may contribute to disability in both of these domains. Identifying mechanisms that underlie the relationship between balance impairments and cognitive impairments may enable us to develop better therapies and interventions that target these mechanisms more effectively to improve quality of life in aging populations. 

In my proposed research project, I will quantify brain and muscle responses during both balance and cognitive tasks in older adults with and without PD to investigate the unexplained relationship between the decline of balance and cognitive abilities in both of these populations. I will use EEG recording of cortical activity and EMG recording of muscle activity in two tasks: (1) a reactive balance task in which a standing subject must recover balance to prevent a fall, and (2) a standardized two-choice reaction time cognitive task. In healthy adults, cortical activity evoked by a balance disturbance is modulated by multiple factors that are in common with both muscle activity evoked by a balance disturbance and cortical activity evoked by mistakes in cognitive tasks.  In PD, impaired cortical activity is related to impaired behavior in cognitive tasks, and impaired muscle activity is related to impaired behavior in balance tasks. I predict that impaired response properties of cortical activity evoked by a balance disturbance in PD will reflect impairment of neural circuitry contributing to deficits in both balance and cognitive domains.