Effect of Vestibular Stimulation on Recruitment of Lower Leg Muscles

Abstract

Vestibular system is actively involved in balance and postural tone adjustment.  Vestibular rehabilitation is a commonly used therapy in various neurological disorders like Cerebral palsy, Stroke and Parkinson disease. There are many previous studies which state the effect of vestibular system on lower leg muscles but no study still to show the effect of vestibular system on muscle recruitment as seen in EMG of lower leg phasic and tonic muscles. The present study puts on efforts to explore the effect of vestibular stimulation on recruitment of phasic and tonic muscles of lower leg in both open and closed kinematic chain movements. The present study was undertaken with 30 normal subjects. The subjects were rotated on a vestibular chair with a frequency of 0.5 Hz, the pre and post rotator muscle recruitment were recorded. The recording was done in both open and closed kinematic movement. Then the mean, standard deviation, and t values were calculated for all the variables. There was a significant change in recruitment of both tonic and phasic muscles after vestibular stimulation as calculated by Paired t-test at 0.05 level of significance. Also there was insignificant difference between recruitment in open versus closed kinematic chain as calculated by unpaired t-test at 0.05 level of significance. It was concluded that vestibular stimulation has a significant effect on recruitment of phasic and tonic muscles, also there was a non significant difference between open and closed kinematic movement recruitment for both phasic and tonic muscles.