Age-specific modifications in healthy adults’ knee joint position sense

Abstract

Aim: Right-handed young adults perform target-matching tasks more accurately with the non-dominant (ND) compared to the dominant (D) limb, but it is unclear if age affects this disparity. We determined if age affects target-matching asymmetry in right-side dominant healthy adults.

Method: Young (n = 12, age: 23.6 y, 6 females) and older (n = 12; age: 75.1 y, 7 females) adults performed a passive joint position-matching task with the D and ND leg in a randomized order.

Result: Age affected absolute, constant, and variable knee JPS errors but, contrary to expectations, it did not affect target-matching asymmetries between the D and ND knees. However, older participants tended to underestimate while young subjects overestimated the target angles. Moreover, older as compared to young subjects performed the target-matching task with higher variability.

Conclusion: Altogether, age seems to affect passive knee target-matching behaviour in right-side dominant healthy adults. The present data indicate that healthy aging produces age-specific modifications in passive joint position sense.

Keywords:

• Aging
• proprioception
• asymmetry
• position sense
• knee

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge that young participants’ absolute JPS data was used in our previous manuscript (Galamb et al. 2018) that aimed to determine if side-dominance affects knee joint target-matching asymmetries between the dominant and non-dominant legs in healthy young participants.

Disclosure statement

All authors declare that they do not have any conflict of interest.