Influência da dupla tarefa nos parâmetros espaço-temporais da marcha de Idosos: uma revisão da literatura

Abstract

Walking is one of the most repetitive and functional human movements. Its evaluation, regarding time and distance parameters, is helpful in predicting subsequent events such as falls. In daily life, people often do many activities in orthostatism or during gait and these activities which have association tasks are called dual tasks. Many falls in older adults occur during dual tasks performance and the clinicians have particular interest in exploring dualtask related gait changes because these strong relationship, since effective interventions base in early identification of older adults with great risk of falling. The aim of this study was, through a literature review, examine which gait spatio-temporal parameters in healthy community-dwelling older adults are related to dual tasks. Articles were searched for in electronic databases MEDLINE via PubMed, Cochrane Collaboration, CINAHL, LILACS and SciELO and selected according to inclusion criteria. Seven articles of 342 obtained were analyzed. Six articles evaluated gait speed and all found significant decrease of gait speed and five articles evaluated swing time and all found significant increase of swing time variability. Few studies evaluated other gait parameters which made it difficult to analyze them alteration. The results suggest strong evidence over effects of a cognitive task in healthy communitydwelling older adults gait. Variability of proposed task and parameter assessed difficult comparison among studies. More studies are necessary to confirm the effects of dual task in parameters of stride variability (length and width), swing variability and body sway. Physical fit older adults seem to get better gait performance during dual task regarding other older adults.