Turn Characteristics During Gait Differ With and Without a Cognitive Demand Among Collegiate Athletes.

CONTEXT:: Sports often involve complex movement patterns, such as turning. While cognitive load effects on gait patterns are well-known, little is known on how it affects biomechanics of turning gait amongst athletes. Such information could help evaluate how concussion affects turning gait required for daily living and sports.

OBJECTIVE:: To determine the effect of a dual-task on biomechanics of turning while walking among collegiate athletes.

DESIGN:: Cross-sectional study.

SETTING:: University laboratory.

PARTICIPANTS:: Fifty-three participants performed five trials of a 20m walk under single- and dual-task conditions at self-selected speed with a 180 turn at 10m mark. `The cognitive load included subtraction, spelling words backwards, or reciting the months backwards.

INTERVENTIONS:: Not applicable.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:: Turn duration, turning velocity, number of steps, standard deviation of turn duration and velocity, coefficient of variation of turn duration and velocity.

RESULTS:: Participants turned significantly slower (155.99 ± 3.71 cm/s vs. 183.52 ± 4.17 cm/s; P < 0.001) and took longer time to complete the turn (2.63 ± 0.05 vs. 2.33 ± 0.04 s; P < 0.001) while dual-tasking albeit taking similar number of steps to complete the turn. Participants also showed more variability in turning time under the dual-task condition (standard deviation of turn duration = 0.39 vs. 0.31 s; P = 0.004).

CONCLUSIONS:: Overall, collegiate athletes turned slower and showed more variability during turning gait while performing a concurrent cognitive dual task compared to single-task turning. The slower velocity increased variability may be representative of specific strategy of turning gait while dual-tasking, which may be a result of the split attention in order to perform the cognitive task. The current study provides descriptive values of absolute and variability turning gait parameters for sports medicine personnel to use while they perform their concussion assessments on their collegiate athletes.