ORCiD

Preeti Oza: 0000-0002-5553-6158

Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Rehabilitation Research and Practice

ISSN

2090-2867

Volume

2017

DOI

10.1155/2017/5107097

First Page

1

Last Page

6

Publication Date

1-1-2017

Abstract

Depression of the Hoffman reflex (H-reflex) is used to examine spinal control mechanisms during exercise, fatigue, and vibration and in response to training. H-reflex depression protocols frequently use trains of stimuli; this is time-consuming and prevents instantaneous assessment of motor neuronal excitability. The purpose of this study was to determine if paired-pulse H-reflex depression is reproducible and whether paired-pulse stimulation adequately estimates the depression induced by the more traditional ten-pulse train. H-reflexes were elicited via ten-pulse trains at 0.1, 0.2, 1, 2, and 5 Hz in ten neurologically intact individuals on two separate days. We measured the depression elicited by the second pulse (H2) and the mean depression elicited by pulses 2–10 (Hmean). H2 was consistent at all frequencies on both days (r2 = 0.97, p < 0.05 , and ICC(3,1) = 0.81). H2 did not differ from Hmean (p < 0.05). The results indicate that paired-pulse H-reflex depression has high between-day reliability and yields depression estimates that are comparable to those obtained via ten-pulse trains. Paired-pulse H-reflex depression may be especially useful for studies that require rapid assessment of motor neuronal excitability, such as during exercise, fatigue, and vibration, or to establish recovery curves following inhibition.

Comments

Copyright © 2017 Preeti D. Oza et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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