The Effects of Auditory Cueing on Rhythmic Movement and Cortical Excitability in Patients With Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive degenerative disease of central nervous systems deficit. The clinical symptoms of Parkinson's disease include the following motor tasks: difficult in initiating movement, performing rhythmic movement or serial movement, the ability of learning motor movement is also affected. The primary treatment for Parkinson's disease is medical treatment; surgery is used if in need. Rehabilitation such as physical therapy, which aims to improve patient's quality of life and functions, is a non-invasive treatment and value for PD patients. Auditory cue is a technique that widely applied on training patients with Parkinson's disease, and some researches revealed that auditory cueing could improve motor performance. However, the mechanism under this treatment technique is still unknown.

This study is to investigate the effect of auditory cueing on rhythmic finger movement in patients with Parkinson's disease. To investigate the mechanism under auditory cueing, neurophysiological data such as motor cortex excitability and blood flow in cortical cortex will be obtained by using Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS).