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At matched loads, aging does not alter ankle, muscle, or tendon stiffness.
Jakubowski, Kristen L; Ludvig, Daniel; Lee, Sabrina S M; Perreault, Eric J.
Afiliação
  • Jakubowski KL; Department of Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL.
  • Ludvig D; Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA.
  • Lee SSM; Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Emory University and Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA.
  • Perreault EJ; Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, Chicago, IL.
bioRxiv ; 2023 Nov 26.
Article em En | MEDLINE | ID: mdl-38045313
ABSTRACT
Older adults have difficulty maintaining balance when faced with postural disturbances, a task that is influenced by the stiffness of the triceps surae and Achilles tendon. Age-related changes in Achilles tendon stiffness have been reported at matched levels of effort, but measures typically have not been made at matched loads, which is important due to age-dependent changes in strength. Moreover, age-dependent changes in muscle stiffness have yet to be tested. Here, we investigate how age alters muscle and tendon stiffness and their influence on ankle stiffness. We hypothesized that age-related changes in muscle and tendon contribute to reduced ankle stiffness in older adults and evaluated this hypothesis when either load or effort were matched. We used B-mode ultrasound with joint-level perturbations to quantify ankle, muscle, and tendon stiffness across a range of loads and efforts in seventeen healthy younger and older adults. At matched loads, there was no significant difference in ankle, muscle, or tendon stiffness between groups (all p>0.13). However, at matched effort, older adults exhibited a significant decrease in ankle (27%; p=0.008), muscle (37%; p=0.02), and tendon stiffness (22%; p=0.03) at 30% of maximum effort. This is consistent with our finding that older adults were 36% weaker than younger adults in plantarflexion (p=0.004). Together these results indicate that, at the loads tested in this study, there are no age-dependent changes in the mechanical properties of muscle or tendon, only differences in strength that result in altered ankle, muscle, and tendon stiffness at matched levels of effort.
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Texto completo: 1 Base de dados: MEDLINE Idioma: En Ano de publicação: 2023 Tipo de documento: Article

Texto completo: 1 Base de dados: MEDLINE Idioma: En Ano de publicação: 2023 Tipo de documento: Article