Morpho-functional correlates of gait impairment in early Parkinson's disease (multimodal path modeling)

• A multimodal path modeling framework links morpho-functional measures to gait impairment in early Parkinson’s disease.¹
• The study appears in Clinical Neurophysiology Volume 184 (April 2026) and uses electrophysiological and clinical methods.¹
• Insights support clinical neurophysiology of gait and movement disorders.^{1 1}

Gardner updates

• A multimodal path modeling framework links morpho-functional correlates to gait impairment in early Parkinson’s disease (Clinical Neurophysiology, April 2026). ¹

Weekly enrichment (2026-07-20)

• The study (Conti et al., Clinical Neurophysiology Vol. 184, April 2026) combined MR-based brainstem morphometry with high-density EEG functional connectivity to probe the pathophysiology of gait impairment in early-stage Parkinson’s disease.²³
• Sample: 73 Parkinson’s disease patients and 60 healthy controls, with the MR Parkinsonism Index (MRPI) — a composite of pons/midbrain area and middle/superior cerebellar peduncle width ratios indexing midbrain atrophy — computed for each subject.²³
• Functional connectivity was measured from HD-EEG across theta, alpha, beta, low-gamma, and high-gamma bands, and Partial Least Squares Path Modeling (PLS-PM) was used to estimate causal relationships among MRPI, connectivity, and clinical gait data.²³
• MRPI was higher in patients than controls (p = 0.001) and correlated with the MDS-UPDRS-III gait subscore (r = 0.54, p < 0.001).²³
• Alpha-band functional connectivity (α-FC) was significantly lower in patients than controls (t = −5.4, p < 0.001) and, within the patient group, was negatively correlated with both MRPI (r = −0.31, p = 0.007) and gait subscore (r = −0.31, p = 0.007).²³
• Path modeling showed MRPI exerted a negative direct effect on α-FC (−0.59, p < 0.001) and a positive total effect on gait impairment (0.53, p < 0.001) that was partially mediated by α-FC (0.19, p = 0.006), while α-FC had its own direct negative effect on gait (−0.33, p = 0.004).²³
• Interpretation: brainstem structural change relates to gait impairment both directly and indirectly through cortical alpha-band dysconnectivity, a dual morpho-functional pattern.²³
• Clinical/BCI implication: because freezing of gait often resists dopaminergic drugs and even deep brain stimulation, the authors position multimodal MRPI + EEG biomarkers as a basis for personalized neuromodulation, though the design is observational and cross-sectional.²³

Footnotes

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1388245726001999?dgcid=rss_sd_all ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41723950/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. https://www.ifcn.info/publications/clinical-neurophysiology-journal/editors-choice ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸