ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Surgery
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1645875
This article is part of the Research TopicSports Medicine and Physical Rehabilitation, Volume IVView all articles
Improving Postural Stability through Proprioceptive Training in Dogs
Provisionally accepted
Christiane Lutonsky*
Nadja Affenzeller
Masoud Aghapour
Julia Wegscheider
Christian Peham
Alexander Tichy
Barbara Bockstahler- University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Vienna, Austria
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Postural stability (PS) is essential for functional mobility and rehabilitation. While posturography and center of pressure (COP) parameters are commonly used to assess PS, little is known about the effects of proprioceptive training programs in dogs. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of a 4week training program in dogs on a motorized proprioceptive training platform which creates a curved movement in the 3 planes of space that follows Elispheric® trajectories (Imoove-vet®, Allcare Innovations, France). Twenty dogs were divided into a training group and a control group. Five conventional COP parameters were measured under 4 different conditions (neutral, uphill, downhill, perturbed standing) pre-and post-intervention. The primary outcomes included statistically significant improvements in craniocaudal (CCD%), mediolateral (MLD%) displacement, and support surface (SS%). Dogs participating in the training group showed statistically significant reductions in COP excursions post-intervention, specifically CCD% during perturbed standing, MLD% during downhill standing, and SS% during uphill standing. Compared to the control group, the training group showed a statistically significant reduction in CCD% and SS% during uphill standing, and MLD% during downhill standing post-intervention. No statistically significant changes were observed, and effect sizes remained below Cohen's d < 0.5 in the control group. In contrast, large training effects (d > 0.8) for all significantly decreased parameters were found in the training group. The results support the effectiveness of proprioceptive training in improving PS specifically under biomechanically challenging conditions highlighting the relevance of including these tasks in PS assessment and training protocols. Further research is warranted in orthopedically and neurologically diseased populations to explore therapeutic applications.
Keywords: posturography, Proprioceptive training, Center of pressure, Canine rehabilitation, postural stability
Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 07 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lutonsky, Affenzeller, Aghapour, Wegscheider, Peham, Tichy and Bockstahler. 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: Christiane Lutonsky, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Vienna, Austria
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