The effect of dopaminergic treatment on whole body kinematics explored through network theory

Three-dimensional motion analysis represents a quantitative approach to assess spatio-temporal and kinematic changes in health and disease. However, these parameters provide only segmental information, discarding minor changes of complex whole body kinematics characterizing physiological and/or pathological conditions. We aimed to assess how levodopa intake affects the whole body, analyzing the kinematic interactions during gait in Parkinson’s disease (PD) through network theory which assess the relationships between elements of a system. To this end, we analysed gait data of 23 people with PD applying network theory to the acceleration kinematic data of 21 markers placed on participants’ body landmarks. We obtained a matrix of kinematic interactions (i.e., the kinectome) for each participant, before and after the levodopa intake, we performed a topological analysis to evaluate the large-scale interactions among body elements, and a multilinear regression analysis to verify whether the kinectome’s topology could predict the clinical variations induced by levodopa. We found that, following levodopa intake, patients with PD showed less trunk and head synchronization ( p -head = 0.048; p -7th cervical vertebrae = 0.032; p -10th thoracic vertebrae = 0.006) and an improved upper-lower limbs synchronization (elbows right, p = 0.002; left, p = 0.005), (wrists right, p = 0.003; left, p = 0.002; knees right, p = 0.003; left, p = 0.039) proportional to the UPDRS-III scores. These results may be attributable to the reduction of rigidity, following pharmacological treatment.