Neurocognitive Reactive Hopping In Individuals With Chronic Ankle Instability And Healthy Controls

Many tools used to assess patients with chronic ankle instability (CAI) are limited by their ability to translate to non-clinical settings. We aimed to use a neurocognitive reactive hopping task that would mimic non-clinical settings by challenging choice reaction, working memory, and motor function simultaneously to determine differences between those with and without CAI. Balance, lower-limb muscle activation, cognitive performance, and prefrontal cortex activation were assessed to determine differences between groups. The CAI group appeared to be less proficient at timing their muscle contractions and also balanced in a different manner than healthy controls; however, there were no differences in cognitive performance or prefrontal cortex activation between groups. We determined that our task difficulty might need to be made more or less difficult to elicit cognitive performance and prefrontal cortex activation differences between groups. If our task is modified to elicit cognitive performance and prefrontal cortex activation differences between groups, the task could assist clinicians in making better informed return-to-sport decisions.