title: Monitoring of Gait Quality in Patients With Chronic Pain of Lower Limbs.
abstract: Severe injuries of lower extremities often lead to chronic pain and reduced walking abilities. We postulated that measuring free-living gait can provide further information about walking ability in complement to clinical evaluations. We sought to validate a method that characterizes free gaits with a wearable sensor. Over one week, 81 healthy controls (HC) and 66 chronic lower limb pain patients (CLLPP) hospitalized for multidisciplinary rehabilitation wore a simple accelerometer (Actigraph). In the acceleration signals, steady 1-min walks detected numbered 7,835 (5,085 in CLLPP and 2,750 in HC). Five gait quality measures were assessed: movement intensity, cadence, stride regularity, and short-term and long-term local dynamic stability. Gait quality variables differed significantly between CLLPP and HC (4%-26%). Intraclass correlation coefficients revealed moderate to high repeatability (0.71-0.91), which suggests that seven days of measurement are sufficient to assess average gait patterns. Regression analyses showed significant association (R2= 0.44) between the gait quality variables and a clinical evaluation of walking ability, i.e., the 6-min walk test. Overall, the results show that the method is easy to implement, valid (high concurrent validity), and reliable to assess walking abilities ecologically.
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Terrier
authors.forename: Joane
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Le Carre
authors.forename: Marie-Laure
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Connaissa
authors.forename: Bertrand
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Leger
authors.forename: Francois
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Luthi
mesh_terms: D061725:Accelerometry; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D059350:Chronic Pain / Q000503:physiopathology*; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005260:Female; D005684:Gait; D020233:Gait Disorders, Neurologic / Q000503:physiopathology* / Q000534:rehabilitation; D064368:Healthy Volunteers; D006801:Humans; D035002:Lower Extremity / Q000503:physiopathology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory / Q000379:methods; D059352:Musculoskeletal Pain / Q000503:physiopathology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D055815:Young Adult