Have you ever considered a sprained ankle as a brain injury? Most people probably would not do this.
However, we’re starting to know how the brain continuously adapts, so-called plasticity.
Although the damage from an ankle sprain takes place within the ankle, there may also be some changes within the brain when it comes to how well it senses pain and movement.
One of our PhD students, Ashley Marchant showed something similar happens when we modify the load (or load) on the muscles of the lower limb. The closer the charge is to Earth’s normal gravity, the more accurate our sense of motion is; the less muscle load, the less accurate we get.
This work means we’d like to rethink how the brain controls and responds to movement.
Solving a crucial puzzle
Historically, exercise science has attempted to enhance muscle function through resistance training, cardiovascular exercises and flexibility.
One of a very powerful issues within the treatment and prevention of sports injuries is that even when the sports medicine team determines that the athlete is able to return, the danger of future injury stays two to eight times higher than in the event that they had never been injured.
This implies that sports doctors missed something.
Our work on the University of Canberra and the Australian Institute of Sport has focused on sensory input to try to resolve this puzzle. The aim was to evaluate the power of sensory reception, i.e. perception, a facet of movement control.
Input (sensory) nerves. they outnumber output (motor) nerves by about ten to 1.
Over 20 years, scientists have developed tools to find out the standard of sensory input reaching the brain, which determines how well we will perceive movement. Evaluating these inputs may very well be useful for everybody from astronauts to athletes and older people susceptible to falls.
We can now measure how well a person receives information from three critical input systems:
- vestibular system (balance organ of the inner ear)
- visual system (students’ response to changes in light intensity)
- position detection system within the lower limbs (mainly from sensors within the muscles and skin of the ankle and foot).
This information allows us to construct a picture of how well a person’s brain collects details about movement. It also indicates which of the three systems may profit from additional rehabilitation or training.
Lessons from space
You could have seen videos of astronauts, for instance on the International Space Station, moving around using only their hands with their legs hanging behind them.
This shows how humans leave Earth’s gravity minimal information for the sensory system from the skin and muscles of the legs.
The brain quickly deactivates the connections it normally uses to manage movement. This is advantageous when an astronaut is in space, but as soon as she or he has to face or walk on the surface of the earth or moon, she or he is at greater risk of falls and injuries.
Similar brain changes can occur in athletes on account of changes in movement patterns after injury.
For example, limping after a leg injury implies that the brain receives movement information that may be very different from the movement patterns of that leg. In the case of plasticity, this will mean that the movement control pattern doesn’t return to its optimal pre-injury state.
As mentioned earlier, injury history is the perfect predictor of future injuries.
This suggests that after injury, there are changes within the athlete’s movement control processes – almost certainly within the brain – that reach outside of time when the damaged tissue heals.
Measures of how well an athlete perceives movement are related to how well she or he performs in various sports. So sensory awareness may be as well a solution to discover sports talents early.
Poor performance on the identical measures of sensory perception may occur in older adults and within the context of fall prevention predict later falls.
This could also be on account of reduced physical activity in some older people. The “use it or lose it” idea may show how brain connections chargeable for perception and movement control can degrade over time.
Precision healthcare
New technologies for tracking sensory abilities are a part of a latest direction in healthcare generally known as precision health.
Precision Health uses technology and artificial intelligence to take note of a range of things (corresponding to their genetic makeup) that affect a person’s health and provide treatments designed specifically for that individual.
Applying a precision health approach to motion control could enable rather more targeted rehabilitation for athletes, training astronauts, and stopping earlier falls in older adults.
