Sensorimotor conflict tests in an immersive virtual environment reveal subclinical impairments in mild traumatic brain injury.

ABSTRACT: Current clinical tests lack the sensitivity needed for detecting subtle balance impairments associated with mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Patient-reported symptoms can be significant and have a huge impact on daily life, but impairments may remain undetected or poorly quantified using clinical measures. Our central hypothesis was that provocative sensorimotor perturbations, delivered in a highly instrumented, immersive virtual environment, would challenge sensory subsystems recruited for balance through conflicting multi-sensory evidence, and therefore reveal that not all subsystems are performing optimally. The results show that, as compared to standard clinical tests, the provocative perturbations illuminate balance impairments in subjects who have had mild traumatic brain injuries

SUBMITTER: Rao HM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7479615 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature