Improving Walking Automaticity in Parkinson's Disease: Levodopa or Donepezil

Summary

Safe and independent mobility at home and in the community requires control of walking while accomplishing other functional tasks. A hallmark of healthy control of walking is automaticity, defined as the ability of the nervous system to successfully coordinate movement with minimal use of attention-demanding executive resources \[1\]. Recent evidence indicates that walking disorders are often characterized by a shift in the locomotor control strategy from healthy automaticity to compensatory executive control. This shift is potentially detrimental to walking performance as an executive control strategy is not optimized for locomotor control and it places excessive demands on a limited pool of cognitive reserve. Here, the investigators hypothesize that walking automaticity, as measured by the prefrontal cortex activity while walking, will be improved by donepezil (a cholinesterase inhibitor).

Timeline

Start

2018-07-30

Primary completion

2019-05-30

Completion

2019-07-30

Drugs

Indications