Effect of Cognitive Training on Gait in Parkinson's Disease

Physiotherapy and targeted rehabilitation are routinely performed in order to influence disorders of posture, gait and stability in Parkinson´s disease (PD), but their effects have been controversial (Keus et al. 2014; Walton wt al. 2014). Recently, several studies suggested that cognitive training can improve gait in patients with PD (Peterson et al. 2016, Heremans et al. 2013), similar to the effects seen in the elderly (Yogev-Seligmann et al. 2008; Amboni et al. 2013). Specific training programs including dual tasking with automatic verbal series, counting etc. have led to increased walking speed and improved stepping cadence, length, and duration in patients with dementia (Schwenk et al. 2010). However, since in advanced PD patients dual-task gait training has to be supervised by therapists, it is not a suitable type of therapy to be performed at home. Therefore, this study aims to verify and extend the encouraging results of the single study which showed a positive effect of cognitive function training on gait in PD (Milman et al. 2014) by exploring this effect in advanced PD patients, by assessing the effect on gait using more targeted clinical and instrumental evaluation, and by comparing two modes of therapy delivery, group and computer-based.