Dual Task and Virtuality Training Innovation to Improve Balance, Posture and Gait in Patients With Parkinson Disease

Introduction Parkinson disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease of the brain, leads to degeneration and causing the motor and non-motor symptoms. PD is characterized by dopaminergic neurotransmitter deficiency. It is a progressive neurological condition that affects more than 10 million people worldwide. Cardinal features of PD are bradykinesia, rigidity and tremor are common symptoms. But gait, postural instability and balance are common risk factors for falling in these population and have a great impact on the quality of life.

There are various treatments available in the pharmacological and surgical field. However, their effectiveness is not satisfying much and invasive procedures are not cost-effective. With the progression of disease patent often become less responsive to medication and develop various difficulties in their daily activities.

Therefore, Physiotherapy(PT) interventions are very important to rehabilitate the patients affected with PD. It helps to improve movement function, motor performance and increase the quality of life. There is active participation from the side of the patient will be there that keeps the patients motivated.

Among emerging approaches in the field of PT, virtual reality(VR) has been proposed as an innovative and effective method for improving gait, balance and postural instability. Patients of PD faces cognitive impairment which leads to impaired attention during their gait because they are unable to put attention on their posture and balance. So attention is responsible for maintaining posture and gait, leads to reduce dual-task ability which is very important in our daily life activities. So to improve the quality of life by correcting posture and gait cognitive dual-task intervention training plays important role in rehabilitation.

Various studies suggested single intervention to improve gait, posture and balance ability in PD patients. To our knowledge, no study investigated the possibility to apply VR with dual-task intervention. the current study compares the effects of VR intervention (VRI) and cognitive dual-task intervention(DTI) between posture, balance and gait. To our knowledge, this will be the first study to compare VRI and DTI on a variety of motor tasks in the homogenous group in their OFF period of medication state.

We hypothesized that addition of VRI with DTI can lead to improve the balance, postural instability and gait in patients with PD and can slow the progression of the disease without changing the medication plan.

2. Materials and Methods: Ethical statement and subject recruitment The study protocol was approved by the institutional research advisory committee (RAC) and registered under the Universal Trial Number (UTN). The protocol will be registered under ClinicalTrials.gov, under World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform and then the study will be submitted for the ethical approval by the institutional ethics committee of Maharishi Markandeshwar Deemed to Be University, Mullana, Haryana with a unique reference number. The study will be executed in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki (Revised, 2013) and National ethical guidelines for Biomedical and Health research involving human participants by Indian council for medical research (ICMR, 2017). The purpose of the study will be clearly explained to the patient with Parkinson disease. A written informed consent form will be obtained from the recruited patients.

Inclusion criteria Idiopathic PD (According to the united kingdom Parkinson's disease society brain bank criteria) Hoehn and Yahr stage III Able to walk without any assistance Age between45-70 Both sex male and female Exclusion criteria Any neurological disease other than PD Vestibular disorders Urinary incontinence Musculoskeletal impairments that could affect gait Inability to stand and walk unassisted Uncooperative patients Random Allocation Total of X patient with Parkinson disease was screened and through convenience sampling method, n patients were selected based on the inclusion criteria for the double, blind three-group pretest-posttest randomized controlled design. Demographic data will be recorded for all the patients. The patient with PD will be allocated in three groups, dual-task treatment group (DTG), virtual reality treatment group (VRG) and daily physiotherapy group (DPG) by compute generated block randomization technique. According to it, there will be n blocks, with the matrix design of n × N, where n being rowed. Each row could have n blocks, patients will be allotted to one of the three groups based on the randomly generated number by computer. Once all the first row will be allotted, then the next row block will be opened for enrolment. The advantage of this method of randomization is that the number of patients assigned to each group over time would have been approximately equal. By this, the unequal allocation of sample size will be avoided. The outcome assessor and the participants involved in the intervention will be blinded.