Abstract
Following total knee replacement (TKR), patients often persist in maladaptive motor behavior which they developed before surgery to cope with symptoms of osteoarthritis. An important challenge in physical therapy is to detect, recognize and change such undesired movement behavior. The goal of this study was to measure the differences in clinical status of patients pre-TKR and post-TKR and to investigate if differences in clinical status were accompanied by differences in the patients’' motor flexibility. Eleven TKR participants were measured twice: pre-TKR and post-TKR (twenty weeks after TKR). In order to infer maladaptation, the pre-TKR and post-TKR measurements of the patient group were separately compared to one measurement in a control group of fourteen healthy individuals. Clinical status was measured with the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) for pain and knee stiffness and the Knee Injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score (KOOS). Furthermore, Lower-limb motor flexibility was assessed by means of a treadmill walking task and a leg-amplitude differentiation task (LAD-task) supported by haptic or visual feedback. Motor flexibility was measured by coordination variability (standard deviation (SD) of relative phase between the legs) and temporal variability (sample entropy) of both leg movements. In the TKR-group, the VAS-pain and VAS- stiffness and the subscales of the KOOS significantly decreased after TKR. In treadmill walking, lower-limb motor flexibility did not significantly change after TKR. Between-leg coordination variability was significantly lower post-TKR compared to controls. In the LAD-task, a significant decrease of between-leg coordination variability between pre-TKR and post-TKR was accompanied by a significant increase in temporal variability. Post-TKR-values of lower-limb flexibility approached the values of the control group. The results demonstrate that a clinically relevant change in clinical status, twenty weeks after TKR, is not accompanied by alterations in lower-limb motor flexibility during treadmill walking but is accompanied by changes in motor flexibility towards the level of healthy controls during a LAD-task with visual and haptic feedback. Challenging patients with non-preferred movements such as amplitude differentiation may be a promising tool in clinical assessment of motor flexibility following TKR.
