Multisensory Action Observation a promising tool to improve freezing of gait in Parkinson’s disease: preliminary data.

Because of its sudden and transient nature, Freezing of Gait (FoG) is one of the most disabling symptom, causing falls that negatively impacts on well-being and quality of life even if not all Parkinson patients experience it. Contrasting or no pharmacological responsiveness of FoG has led to an increasing interest in rehabilitation interventions, aimed at functional gait recovery. Currently, the “best practice” employed for rehabilitation is based on attentional strategies, and on the use of temporal or spatial external stimuli (cues) to facilitate the initiation and ongoing motor activity. However, these strategies may generate an important dependence that implies to rely critically on cues in the environment. Moreover, in certain circumstances, cueing may trigger freezing episodes as dual task conditions. Re-Learning motor strategies without cues (ie using action observation [1]) can be an alternative/innovative approach to rehabilitation that relies more on appropriate allocation of attention and lightening cognitive load.