| Summary: | 碩士 === 長庚大學 === 職能治療學系 === 102 === Recently, many psychophysical studies have reported that patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have perceptual impairments. PD patients have been found to have impaired kinesthesia at early stage of disease. This study investigated the difference thresholds of passive limb motion and position sense at forearm in PD patients. 30 PD patients and 32 age-matched healthy controls were recruited in this study. A passive motion apparatus was used to measure difference thresholds of limb position and passive motion sense. Each participant sat on the chair and wore goggles and a headphone to exclude visual and auditory cues. Each trial consisted of a standard stimulus and a comparison stimulus. For position sense, participants were asked to indicate which angular displacement was further away from the body than the other. For passive motion sense, participants were required to indicate which angular velocity was faster than the other. Threshold was defined as the stimulus intensity with 75% correct response. The mean difference threshold of position sense were 0.97 ± 0.12º for PD patients and 0.69 ± 0.20 º for the control. For passive motion sense, the mean difference thresholds were 0.56 ± 0.21 º/s for the PD group, and 0.43 ± 0.17 º/s for the control group. Disease duration, disease severity and medication were not significantly correlated with the kinesthetic thresholds. These results suggested that kinesthetic sensitivity was reduced in PD patients. This study added a growing evidence to show the wide arrays of kinesthetic deficits in PD.
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