ArticleTai Chi improves standing balance control under reduced or conflicting sensory conditions1☆,
Section snippets
Participants
Twenty young healthy subjects (12 men, 8 women; mean age ± standard deviation [SD], 21.5±1.6y) were recruited. All were university students who had exercised regularly for at least 2 hours a week. Exclusion criteria were the presence of inner ear problems, dizziness, long-term medication, a history of injury within 1 year before the study, and a history of an orthopedic operation or a neurologic disease.
Forty community-dwelling elderly subjects (20 per group), aged 60 or older, participated in
Test-retest reliability of the SOT
Twelve elderly subjects (4 men, 8 women, mean age 68±7.4y) participated in the test-retest reliability study. After measuring their equilibrium quotients in each of the 6 conditions of the SOT, the testing procedures were repeated 1 week after the first testing session. The ICC3,3 was calculated for all 6 conditions (table 1) These values ranged from .72 (condition 3) to .93 (condition 5), which indicated moderate to good correlation.37 The lower bound value of the 95% confidence interval (CI)
Sensory organization test
Quantitative posturography has been used by several researchers to study the ability of elderly subjects to use somatosensory, visual, and vestibular information to control their body sway when standing under reduced or conflicting sensory conditions.29, 31, 38 Results from our reliability study showed that the data obtained under the 6 sensory conditions were repeatable when the same elderly subjects were tested 1 week apart, with ICCs ranging from .72 to .93 (table 1).
In this study, the COP
Conclusion
We investigated possible effects of Tai Chi on balance control by examining subject’s ability to use somatosensory, visual, and vestibular information to control their body sway while standing under 6 different sensory conditions when somatosensory or visual inputs were either absent or inaccurate. Our results indicate that practicing Tai Chi for 7.2±7.2 years improved the control of stance under reduced or conflicting sensory conditions in an elderly population. Elderly Tai Chi practitioners
Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Rhonda Scudds, Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, for her statistical advice, and Bill Purves for his English editorial advice.
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Supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (research grant).
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