The purpose of this research study is to evaluate the effect of brief bouts of intermittent walking on bodily pain, pain during movement, and how the body adapts to musculoskeletal pain in older adults.
The purpose of this study is to determine whether exposure to acute sitting compared to sitting interrupted with brief bouts of light intensity walking exerts short term effects on resting pain, endogenous pain modulation measured via quantitative sensory testing (QST), and movement-evoked pain (MEP) in older adults. Participants will be asked to complete two study sessions, with the first study session lasting 3 hours and the second study session lasting 2.5 hours. All sessions will take place in the National Institute of Sport Fitness, where the Physical Activity and Pain laboratory is located. The first session will include the following procedures in the following order: informed consent process, healthy history for screening purposes, quantitative sensory testing (QST), 6-minute walk test, completion of questionnaires, QST, experimental conditions of either 1 hour of sitting or 1 hour of sitting with bouts of light intensity walking, QST, and the 30-second chair stand test. Session 2 will take place at least 7 days after session 1 and will be identical except for the informed consent and screening will be replaced by questionnaires and the experimental condition will consist of the one not performed in session 1. Participants will be asked to take their medications at the same time prior to each study visit and we will assess medications taken the day of each visit prior to the visit.
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
OTHER
Masking
SINGLE
Enrollment
40
The participant will remain seated throughout the 1 hour experimental period. During this 1-hour period, participants will complete six bouts of 2.5-minutes of light intensity walking. Overall, the bouts will occur on six occasions, providing a total of 15 minutes of light intensity activity.
The participant will remain seated throughout the experimental period and will be instructed to minimize excessive movement, only rising from the chair to void. This experimental condition is designed to mimic prolonged uninterrupted sedentary behavior.
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RECRUITINGMechanical Temporal Summation of Pain (TS)
TS will be administered on the back of the left hand. First, a single pinprick stimulus using a von Frey filament of 6.65 Mn or 300 g will be applied to the body site. Participants will rate the perceived pain intensity using a numeric rating scale of 0 (no pain at all) to 100 (worst pain imaginable). Then, a series of 10 pinprick stimuli (6.65 Mn) will be administered at a rate of 1 Hz, applied to the body site within an area of 1 cm2. The temporal summation value will be calculated as the difference between the first and last stimuli.
Time frame: Pre and post the 1-hour experimental conditions
Conditioned Pain Modulation
CPM will be assessed by determining the ability of a cold water bath (conditioning stimulus) to diminish pressure pain thresholds (PPTs) and temporal summation (TS) (test stimuli) applied at a separate body site. For the CPM trials, PPTs and TS will be measured pre and post a conditioning stimulus. Conditioning stimulus: At least 4 minutes will separate the pre pain assessments (i.e., PPT, TS) and the initiation of the conditioning stimulation, during which subjects will sit quietly. Then, participants will immerse their right hand up to the wrist in a cold water bath maintained at 10oC for up to 1 minute or until they report intolerable pain. The dependent variable for the CPM test will be the change in the test stimuli (PPT and TS) following the conditioning stimulus.
Time frame: Pre and post the 1-hour experimental conditions
Movement-evoked pain during the 30-second chair stand test
This test will be administered using a folding chair without arms, placed against a wall to prevent it from moving during the test. The test begins with the subject seated in the middle of the chair, feet at an angle slightly back from the knees, with one foot slightly in front of the other to help maintain balance when standing. Arms will be crossed at the wrists and held against the chest. At the signal of "go", subjects will rise to a full stand and then return back to the initial position. The subjects will be encouraged to complete as many full stands as possible within a 30-s time limit. Participants will rate their current bodily pain on a 0 to 10 numeric rating scale (NRS), with 0 indicating "No pain" and 10 indicating "Pain as bad as you can imagine". Participants will rate their bodily pain before, during, and after the chair stand test as a measure of movement evoked pain.
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Time frame: Will be administered immediately after the 1-hour experimental conditions.