ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Rehabil. Sci.
Sec. Rehabilitation in Neurological Conditions
Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fresc.2025.1607515
This article is part of the Research TopicBiomechanical Performance and Relevant Mechanism of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation for Neuromusculoskeletal Disorders, Volume IIView all 16 articles
Does body weight support improve neural and biomechanical measures during treadmill gait in children with unilateral cerebral palsy?
Provisionally accepted
- 1Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Clinical Center (NIH), Bethesda, United States
- 2National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, Maryland, United States
- 3Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
- 4Department of Sports Rehabilitation, Cheongju University, Cheongju, Republic of Korea
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Introduction: Body weight support (BWS) treadmill training, commonly utilized to improve gait, has inconsistent evidence of effectiveness across disorders. Methods: We aimed to comprehensively evaluate its scientific rationale by comparing immediate effects of two weight support levels (20%, 40%) to unsupported (0%) treadmill walking on neural and biomechanical measures in children with unilateral cerebral palsy (CP) and typical development (TD). We hypothesized BWS would demonstrate positive effects only in CP. Participants included 10 with TD and 8 with CP (mean age =14.6 and 15.4 years, respectively). Results: Minimal or no group differences or BWS effects were found for synergy number, structure or Walk-DMC, whereas the Gait Deviation Index (GDI) showed a significant interaction with 20% BWS where the dominant side in CP improved with 20% BWS while both sides in TD worsened. Beta band EEG activation from 0-20% BWS showed a significant triple interaction increasing in the non-dominant and decreasing in the dominant hemisphere in TD, while increasing in both in CP. A worsening trend was seen with 40% BWS in all measures except z scores. Conclusion: BWS has beneficial effects on kinematics in CP supporting the basic premise for use in neurorehabilitation at the body structure level.
Keywords: muscle synergies, Electroencephalography, kinematics, Temporal-spatial, non-negative matrix factorization, unloading
Received: 07 Apr 2025; Accepted: 25 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Damiano, Banerjee, Kim and Bulea. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Diane L Damiano, damianod@cc.nih.gov
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.