Have you ever considered an ankle sprain as a brain injury? Most people probably won't.
However, we're starting to grasp how the brain is always adapting, often called Plasticity.
Although ankle sprains damage the ankle, there can also be some changes within the brain in the way it senses pain or movement.
One of our doctoral students, Illustrated by Ashley Marchant. Something similar happens when we modify how much weight (or load) we placed on the lower limb muscles. The closer the load is to the Earth's normal gravity, the more accurate our sense of motion. The lower the muscle load, the less accuracy we get.
This work means we'd like to rethink how the brain controls and responds to movement.
Solving a vital puzzle
Historically, movement science has sought to enhance muscle function Resistance training, Cardiovascular exercise and adaptability.
A significant problem within the treatment and prevention of sports injuries is that even when the sports medicine team feels an athlete is able to return, The risk of future injury is two to eight times higher. Compared to in the event that they had never been hurt.
That means sports medicine experts are missing something.
Our work on the University of Canberra and the Australian Institute of Sport has targeted sensory input in an try to solve this puzzle. The goal is to evaluate the flexibility of the sensory reception, or perception, aspect of movement control.
Input (sensory) nerves The number of output (motor) nerves is about ten to one..
Over 20 years, scientists have developed tools that allow us to find out the standard of sensory input to the brain, which forms the premise of how well we perceive movement. Assessing this input may be useful for all the pieces from astronauts to athletes and older people susceptible to falls.
We can now measure how well an individual receives information from three essential input systems:
- Vestibular system (balance organs of the inner ear)
- Visual system (pupil responses to changes in light intensity)
- Position sense systems within the lower limbs (mainly from sensors within the ankle and foot muscles and skin).
This information allows us to construct an image of how well an individual's brain is gathering movement information. It also indicates which of the three systems may profit from additional maintenance or training.
Lessons from space
You can have seen videos of astronauts, comparable to those on the International Space Station, walking around using only their arms, with their legs hanging behind them.
It shows how people get after they leave Earth's gravity. Minimal information for the sensory system From the skin and muscles of their legs.
The brain rapidly deactivates the connections it normally uses to regulate movement. This is superb when astronauts are in space, but as soon as they should stand or walk on the surface of the Earth or moon, they're at greater risk of falling and being injured.
Similar brain changes can occur for athletes attributable to changes in movement patterns after an injury.
For example, limping after a leg injury implies that the brain is receiving very different movement information from that leg's movement pattern. With plasticity, this will mean that the movement control pattern doesn't return to its optimal pre-injury state.
As mentioned earlier, injury history is one of the best predictor of future injury.
This suggests that after injury there are some changes within the athlete's movement control processes – presumably within the brain – which might be exacerbated. Ahead of time When the injured tissue heals.
Measures of how well an athlete perceives movement correlate with how well they perform in a variety of sports. So there may be sensory awareness. A method for early identification of athletic talent.
In older people and within the context of fall prevention, poorer scores on the identical sensory input perception measures Forecast to fall later.
This could also be attributable to a decrease in physical activity in some older people. This “use it or lose it” idea may reflect how the brain's connections for movement perception and control can decline over time.
Proper health care
New technologies to trace sensory capability are a part of a brand new direction in healthcare as described. Health related to health.
Precision health uses technologies and artificial intelligence to think about the range of things (comparable to their genetic makeup) that affect an individual's health and deliver treatments tailored specifically to them.
Applying a holistic approach to health in the sphere of movement control can enable rather more targeted rehabilitation for athletes, training for astronauts and early fall prevention for the elderly.