Altered fractal dynamics of gait: reduced stride-interval correlations with aging and Huntington's disease

Hausdorff, Jeffrey M., Susan L. Mitchell, Renee Firtion, C. K. Peng, Merit E. Cudkowicz, Jeanne Y. Wei, and Ary L. Goldberger. Altered fractal dynamics of gait: reduced stride-interval correlations with aging and Huntington’s disease.J. Appl. Physiol. 82(1): 262–269, 1997.—Fluctuations in the duration of the gait cycle (the stride interval) display fractal dynamics and long-range correlations in healthy young adults. We hypothesized that these stride-interval correlations would be altered by changes in neurological function associated with aging and certain disease states. To test this hypothesis, we compared the stride-interval time series of 1) healthy elderly subjects and young controls and of 2) subjects with Huntington’s disease and healthy controls. Using detrended fluctuation analysis, we computed α, a measure of the degree to which one stride interval is correlated with previous and subsequent intervals over different time scales. The scaling exponent α was significantly lower in elderly subjects ...