Unraveling the mechanisms of high-level gait control in functional gait disorders

Functional gait disorders (FGDs) are a disabling subset of Functional Neurological Disorders in which presenting symptoms arise from altered high-level motor control. The dual-task paradigm can be used to investigate mechanisms of high-level gait control. The study aimed to determine the objective measures of gait that best discriminate between individuals with FGDs and healthy controls and the relationship with disease severity and duration. High-level spatiotemporal gait outcomes were analyzed in 87 patients with FGDs (79.3% women, average age 41.9±14.7 years) and 48 healthy controls (60.4% women, average age 41.9±15.7 years) on single and motor, cognitive, and visual-fixation dual tasks. The area under the curve (AUC) from the receiver operator characteristic plot and the dual-task effect (DTE) were calculated for each measure. Dual-task interference on the top single-task gait characteristics was determined by two-way repeated measures ANOVA. Stride time variability and its standard deviation (SD) failed to discriminate between the two groups in single and dual-task conditions (AUC<0.80 for all). Significant group x task interactions were observed for swing time SD and stride time on the cognitive dual tasks (p<0.035 for all). Longer disease duration was associated with poor gait performance and unsteadiness in motor and cognitive DTE (p<0.003) but improvement in stride length and swing time on the visual dual tasks (p<0.041). Our preliminary findings shed light on measures of gait automaticity as a diagnostic and prognostic gait biomarker and underline the importance of early diagnosis and management in individuals with FGDs.