IMR Press / JIN / Volume 22 / Issue 5 / DOI: 10.31083/j.jin2205133
Open Access Original Research
Evaluating Dual Task Neurological Costs with Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy: A Preliminary Report in Healthy Athletes
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1 Department of Occupational Therapy, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80524, USA
2 Molecular Cellular Integrative Neuroscience, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA
3 Department of Electrical, Electronic and Information Engineering ‘Guglielmo Marconi’, University of Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy
4 Health Sciences and Technologies-Interdepartmental Center for Industrial Research (CIRI-SDV), University of Bologna, 40136 Bologna, Italy
*Correspondence: jaclyn.stephens@colostate.edu (Jaclyn A Stephens)
J. Integr. Neurosci. 2023, 22(5), 133; https://doi.org/10.31083/j.jin2205133
Submitted: 11 March 2023 | Revised: 31 May 2023 | Accepted: 25 June 2023 | Published: 18 September 2023
Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s). Published by IMR Press.
This is an open access article under the CC BY 4.0 license.
Abstract

Background: Dual task assessments, which simultaneously challenge and assess cognitive and motor performance, have been used to improve the assessment of athletes with sports-related concussions (SRC). Our lab created a Dual Task Screen (DTS) to evaluate athletes with SRCs, and we have established that it is a valid behavioral measure, as it consistently elicits poorer behavioral performance under dual, compared to single, task conditions. Here, we used a Neuroimaging-Compatible (NC) version of the DTS, named the NC-DTS, which uses portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to assess behavioral performance and neural recruitment during single and dual tasks. Our study objective was to evaluate healthy athletes and establish whether the NC-DTS is a valid dual task neurological assessment that can elicit different patterns of neural recruitment during dual versus single task conditions. Methods: Twenty-five healthy collegiate athletes completed the NC-DTS in a single laboratory visit. The NC-DTS includes a lower and upper extremity subtask; both include single motor, single cognitive, and dual task conditions. The NC-DTS was administered in a block design, where conditions (i.e., single motor, single cognitive, and dual task) were repeated five times to generate average behavioral performance and task-dependent neural recruitment in superficial cortical regions including: prefrontal cortex, bilateral primary motor and sensory cortices, and posterior parietal cortex. Neural recruitment was measured with fNIRS and quantified using oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) and deoxygenated hemoglobin (HbR) metrics. A single-tailed, within subject t-test was used to compare average dual task behavioral performance to average single task behavioral performance. Pairwise comparisons, that were family-wise-error (FWE) corrected, were used to compare localized neural recruitment during dual versus single task conditions. Results: As observed in previous studies, the NC-DTS elicited significantly poorer behavioral performance under dual, compared to single, task conditions. Additionally, dual task conditions of the NC-DTS elicited significantly greater neural recruitment in regions of the brain associated with attention allocation and task-specific demands in three of four comparisons. Conclusions: These preliminary results suggest that the NC-DTS is a valid dual task neurological assessment which warrants future work using the NC-DTS to evaluate athletes with SRCs.

Keywords
sports-related concussion
dual task
functional near-infrared spectroscopy
measure development
Funding
5K01HD096047–02/National Institutes of Health
K12 HD055931/National Institutes of Health
Figures
Fig. 1.
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