Shu Morioka

Kio University, Nara, Japan · Neurorehabilitation

Sense of agency refers to the experience of controlling one’s actions. Studies on healthy people indicated that their self-other attribution can be realized based on prediction error which is an inconsistency between the internal prediction and sensory feedback of the movements. However, studies on patients with post-stroke sensorimotor deficits hy...

Background: Pain can alter muscle activity, although it is not clear how pain intensity and site location affect muscle activity. This study aimed to reveal the complex associations among the pain site, pain intensity/quality, muscle activity, and muscle activity distribution. Methods: Electromyographic signals were recorded from above a bilater...

Although children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) show impaired precision grip control due to a sensory-motor integration deficit, their spatial instability (such as changes in force direction and object roll during a precision grip task) is unclear. Herein, we investigated the spatial instability in the precision grip force control...

Healthcare workers need to educate patients regarding proper sitting positions to prevent pressure injuries in the elderly and disabled. The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences in normal and shear force in the gluteal region using the combination of tilt-in-space and reclining functions of wheelchairs. Twelve healthy subjects w...

Motor recovery is related to the corticospinal tract (CST) lesion in post-stroke patients. The CST originating from the supplementary motor area (SMA) affects the recovery of impaired motor function. We confirmed the effects of transcranial direct current electrical stimulation (tDCS) over the SMA combined with walk training on CST excitability. Th...

Introduction: Neuropathic pain after spinal cord injury is difficult to treat, and it is associated with abnormalities in the function of the thalamus-to-cortex neural circuitry. Aerobic exercise provides immediate improvement in neuropathic pain and is associated with abnormal resting electroencephalography (EEG) findings in patients with spinal...

The appearance of the self-body influences the feeling that one’s body belongs to oneself, that is, a sense of ownership (SoO) and pain perception. This can be identified by measuring the SoO and pain thresholds after performing the rubber hand illusion (RHI) with an injured rubber hand. The generation of SoO is thought to be caused by multisensory...

In patients with severe motor paralysis, increasing the excitability of the supplementary motor area (SMA) in the non-injured hemisphere contributes to the recovery of lower limb motor function. However, the contribution of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the SMA of the non-injured hemisphere in the recovery of lower limb motor...

The major aim of the present study was to investigate whether painful stimuli have a differential effect on the Readiness Potential (RP) in terms of the early and late components. We hypothesized that painful stimuli would modulate the cortical movement preparatory activity and the components to a different extent when compared to non-painful stimu...

Background Pain-related fear influences impaired trunk movement (e.g., limited movement of range and velocity), but it is unclear how fear relates to trunk motor coordination (e.g., a more “in-phase” upper-lower trunk motion pattern). We conducted the present study to: (1) identify the motor coordination pattern of the in-phase upper-lower lumbar m...

[Purpose] Patients with chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) often suffer from sensorimotor dysfunction of the distal portion of the extremities (e.g., loss of somatosensory sensation, numbness/tingling, difficulty typing on a keyboard, or difficulty undoing or doing up a button). The present study aimed to reveal the effects of subthr...

The central sensitization inventory (CSI) evaluates the central sensitization (CS)-related symptoms associated with increased pain sensitivity. However, the CSI includes items that are not directly related to pain. In this study, 146 patients with pain were classified into subgroups by k-means cluster analysis based on the short form of the central...

In post-stroke patients, muscle synergy (the coordination of motor modules during walking) is impaired. In some patients, the muscle synergy termed module 1 (hip/knee extensors) is merged with module 2 (ankle plantar flexors), and in other cases, module 1 is merged with module 4 (knee flexors). However, post-stroke individuals with a merging patter...

Haptic feedback by light touch with a fingertip influences the postural control of the human body by postural orientation. Postural control might therefore differ depending on the characteristics of the contacting object. The main experimental targets of contact have been a fixed object (fixed light touch: FLT) and an individual (interpersonal ligh...

Objective To examine the relationship between temporal asymmetry and complexity of muscle synergy during walking using rhythmic auditory cueing (RAC) and the factors related to changes in muscle synergy during walking with RAC in stroke survivors. Design Cross-sectional study. Setting Wards at two medical corporation hospitals. Participants Fort...

Background Patients with chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) often suffer from sensorimotor dysfunction of the distal portion of the extremities (e.g., loss of somatosensory sensation, numbness/tingling, difficulty typing on a keyboard, or difficulty undoing or doing up a button). The present study aimed to reveal the effects of subth...

Background The pain trajectory is an early detection/prediction method for chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP). It is unclear whether a pain trajectory can predict CPSP in patients who have undergone a total knee arthroplasty (TKA). Here we investigated (1) whether CPSP can be predicted in TKA patients, and (2) the values that can be used to predict C...

Purpose To identify impaired trunk movement during work-related activity in individuals with low back pain (LBP) and investigate whether abnormalities were caused by generalized fear of movement-related pain. Methods This cross-sectional study was conducted at a hospital in Japan. We recruited 35 participants with LBP (LBP group; 26 males, 9 femal...

Background: Long-term physiotherapy is acknowledged to be crucial to manage motor symptoms for Parkinson's disease (PD) patients, but its effectiveness is not well understood. Objective: This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to assess the evidence regarding the effectiveness of long-term physiotherapy to improve motor symptoms and reduc...

The readiness potential (RP), which is a slow negative electrical brain potential that occurs before voluntary movement, can be interpreted as a measure of intrinsic brain activity originating from self-regulating mechanisms. Early and late components of the RP may indicate clinical-neurophysiological features such as motivation, preparation, inten...

This study aimed to perform cluster analysis in patients with chronic pain to extract groups with similar circadian rhythms and compare neuropathic pain and psychological factors among these groups to identify differences in pain-related outcomes. A total of 63 community-dwellers with pain lasting at least 3 months and Numerical Rating Scale scores...

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) experience various restrictions owing to their underdeveloped mobility. Home confinement due to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic may further increase these restrictions. We report the case of a 7-year-old boy with CP (Gross Motor Function Classification System level IV) whose motor function declined during the...

Background: Individuals with chronic low back pain (CLBP) experience changes in gait control due to pain and/or fear. Although CLBP patients' gait has been performed in laboratory environments, changes in gait control as an adaptation to unstructured daily living environments may be more pronounced than the corresponding changes in laboratory envi...

Background: Footsteps and walking trajectories during the Timed Up and Go test (TUG), and their relationships with spatiotemporal gait parameters during turning in people with Parkinson's disease (PD) and older people have not been clarified. Research question: We investigated the footsteps, walking trajectories, and spatiotemporal parameters du...

In individuals with a musculoskeletal disorder, goal-directed reaching movements of the hand are distorted. Here, we investigated a pain-related fear-conditioning effect on motor control. Twenty healthy participants (11 women and 9 men, 21.7 ± 2.7 years) performed a hand-reaching movement task. In the acquisition phase, a painful electrocutaneous s...

Objectives: Application of spatially interlaced innocuous warm and cool stimuli to the skin elicits illusory pain, known as the thermal grill illusion (TGI). This study aimed to discriminate the underlying mechanisms of central and peripheral neuropathic pain focusing on pain quality, which is considered to indicate the underlying mechanism(s) of...

Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) was originally regarded as a parietal syndrome, but it has become evident that USN is a disturbance in the widespread attention network. Here, we focused on an interaction between spatial neglect and non-spatial aspect of attention deficit, and aimed to establish a novel evaluation approach based on the characterist...

Fear of movement-related pain is known to disturb the process of motor preparation in patients with chronic pain. In the present study, we aimed to clarify the neural mechanisms underlying the influence of fear movement-related pain on motor preparatory brain activity using Libet’s clock and electroencephalography (EEG). Healthy participants were a...

The vestibulospinal tract (VST) plays an important role in the control of the ipsilateral antigravity muscles, and the balance of left and right VST excitability is important in human postural control. A method for measuring VST excitability is the application of galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) before tibial nerve stimulation that evokes the...

Background: Patients with brachial plexus avulsion (BPA) usually experience phantom sensations and phantom limb pain (PLP) in the deafferented limb. It has been suggested that evoking the sensation of touch in the deafferented limb by stimulating referred sensation areas (RSAs) on the cheek or shoulder might alleviate PLP. However, feasible rehabi...

The human vestibulospinal tract has important roles in postural control, but it has been unknown whether vestibulospinal tract excitability is influenced by the body's postures. We investigated whether postures influence the vestibulospinal tract excitability by a neurophysiological method, i.e., applying galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) 100 m...

Visuospatial neglect (VSN) is a neurological syndrome of higher brain functions in which an individual fails to detect stimuli on a space that is contralateral to a hemispheric lesion. We performed a comprehensive multivariate analysis based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and cluster analysis in patients with right hemisphere stroke and...

Background: There is increasing evidence that the stochastic resonance (SR) phenomenon provided by subthreshold mechanical noise stimulation improves the sensory-motor system. However, the effect of SR on children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) is unclear. The purpose of this study was to assess whether SR activated by subthreshold...

Objectives: We examined whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) combined with aerobic exercise (AE) modulated the pressure pain threshold (PPT) and peak alpha frequency (PAF) measured via resting electroencephalography. Design: Single-blind experimental study with a cross-over design. Setting: Neuro Rehabilitation Research Cente...

Sense of agency (SoA), the feeling of control over one’s own actions and their effects, is fundamental to goal-directed actions at the individual level and may constitute a cornerstone of everyday life, including cooperative behavior (i.e., goal sharing). Previous studies have demonstrated that goal sharing can activate the motor prediction of both...

Background Previous studies have suggested that children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) rely heavily on vision to perform movements, which may contribute to their clumsy movements. However, few studies have objectively and quantitatively investigated the perceptual biases of children with DCD. Methods A visual-tactile temporal orde...

In social contexts, people are responsible for their actions and outcomes. Diffusion of responsibility is a well-known social phenomenon: people feel less responsible when performing an action with co-actors than when acting alone. In previous studies, co-actors reduced the participant’s responsibility attribution by making the cause of the outcome...

Introduction: In this study, we developed a patient-reported instrument to measure shared decision-making (SDM) in rehabilitation medicine, and examined its reliability and validity in the field of physical therapy. Methods: The SDM for rehabilitation (SDM-Reha) prototype was created from the elements of SDM determined to be necessary in the rehabi...

Objectives In patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP), reduced lumbar flexion-relaxation and reduced variability of muscle activity distribution are reported as abnormal muscle activity. It is not known how abnormal muscle activity and pain-related factors are related to CLBP-based disability. Here, we performed an association rule analysis to i...

This study investigated the impact of environment and pathology in trunk variability and stability of gait among individuals with CLBP. CLBP patients (n = 20) and healthy controls (HC) with no LBP history (n = 20) attached an accelerometer to the low back and performed gait in laboratory and daily-living settings. We calculated stride-to-stride sta...

This study investigated the impact of environment in trunk controls of gait among individuals with CLBP. CLBP patients (n=20) and healthy controls (HC) with no LBP history (n=20) attached an accelerometer to the low back and performed gait in laboratory and daily-living settings. We calculated stride-to-stride standard deviation (SD) and multiscale...

Background There is increasing evidence that children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) have deficits in sensory-motor integration, but it is unclear whether the sense of agency (SoA) generated by sensory-motor integration is altered. Aims To investigate whether there is a difference in the time window for SoA between children with DC...

Purpose: The cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between pain-related factors and muscle activity in patients with chronic low back pain (CLBP) are unclear. This study aimed to examine the temporal associations between them in a CLBP patient using a single-case analysis to account for an individual course. Patient and methods: A patien...

Technical reasoning refers to making inferences about how to use tools. The degree of technical reasoning is indicated by the bias of the gaze (fixation) on the functional part of the tool when in use. Few studies have examined whether technical reasoning differs between familiar and unfamiliar novel tools. In addition, what effect the intention to...

Children with cerebral palsy (CP) often exhibit mental health problems, such as depressive symptoms. The purpose of this study was to describe the self-rated depressive symptoms in children with and without CP and to investigate the associated predictors. Participants included 24 children with CP and 33 typically developing (TD) children. Depressiv...

The process of pain recovery varies and can include the recovery, maintenance, or worsening of symptoms. Many cases of patients with pain show a tendency of recovering as predicted; however, some do not. The characteristics of cases that do not fit the prediction of pain recovery remain unclear. We performed cluster and decision tree analyses to re...

We present the case of a female patient who developed complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) after a right-foot injury. The patient had pain from the right knee to the toes and showed severe disgust at the appearance of the affected limb. Consequently, the affected limb was not fully loaded, and the patient had difficulty walking. General interventi...

Noticing the regularity of the task is necessary to enhance motor performance. The experience of noticing further motivates improvement in motor performance. Motor control is explained by a comparator model that modifies the motor command to reduce discrepancies between sensory predictions and actual outcomes. A similar model could apply to sense o...

Self-other sensory attribution is necessary to realize feedback control because the self-attribution of sensations can drive feedback control. Some studies have suggested that self-other attribution is realized by the integration of both sensorimotor cues, including internal prediction and/or sensory feedback, and cognitive cues, such as knowledge...

Background After a distal radius fracture (DRF), severe pain, disabilities, and pain-related psychological problems can arise and sometimes remain ~1 year later. DRF-related disabilities have been assessed with questionnaires but not by kinematic evaluations; the kinematic features of DRF patients are unknown. Here, we investigated the kinematic ch...

Walking speed is strongly influenced by the severity of motor paralysis in post-stroke patients. Nevertheless, some patients with mild motor paralysis still walk slowly. Factors associated with this difference in walking speed have not been elucidated. To confirm walking characteristics of patients with mild motor paralysis and slow walking speed,...

Post-stroke sensorimotor deficits impair voluntary movements. This impairment may alter a person’s sense of agency, which is the awareness of controlling one’s actions. A previous study showed that post-stroke patients incorrectly aligned themselves with others’ movements and proposed that their misattributions might be associated with their sensor...

Yoshiyuki Hirakawa,1 Akira Fujiwara,2 Ryota Imai,3,4 Yuki Hiraga,1,5 Shu Morioka4,6 1Department of Rehabilitation, Fukuoka Rehabilitation Hospital, Fukuoka City, Fukuoka, Japan; 2Department of Orthopedics, Fukuoka Reha Orthopedic Clinic, Fukuoka City, Fukuoka, Japan; 3School of Rehabilitation, Osaka Kawasaki Rehabilitation University, Kaizuka City,...

Is there a difference in sense of agency between children and adults? This study investigated the difference in the time window of sense of agency between school-age children (N = 94, aged 6–12 years) and young adults (N = 30, aged 21–23 years) by using an agency attribution task and international standardized manual dexterity test. The results sho...

Background A method for modeling the acute pain trajectory using the simple linear fit of an individual’s pain intensity scores after surgery was developed and affords more precise measurement than conventional pain assessment. However, the method has disadvantage of using only the slope without considering the intercept. The purpose of this study...

Sense of agency refers to the feeling of being in control of one’s actions. Previous research has demonstrated that sense of agency is produced through the sensorimotor system, which is involved in comparing internal predictions with sensory feedback in motor control. Therefore, sensorimotor deficits might impair agency through a sensorimotor syste...

Although the media can have both negative and positive effects on children’s cognitive and motor functions, its influence on their perceptual bias and manual dexterity is unclear. Thus, we investigated the association between media viewing time, media preference level, perceptual bias, and manual dexterity in 100 school-aged children. Questionnaire...

Virtual reality (VR) systems have been integrated into rehabilitation techniques for phantom limb pain (PLP). In this case report, we used electroencephalography (EEG) to analyze corticocortical coherence between the bilateral sensorimotor cortices during vibrotactile stimulation in conjunction with VR rehabilitation in two PLP patients. As a resul...

Fear of movement-related pain leads to two types of avoidance behavior: excessive avoidance and pain-inhibited movement. Excessive avoidance is an absence of movement by fear, and pain-inhibited movements involve a change in motor behavior for the purpose of protecting the painful part. Here, we sought to clarify the acquisition process and adaptat...

In the figure 2, “CLBP Low fear” located at the right end of Time of Phase 1 is wrong. The correct statement is “CLBP High fear”. The complete correct figure 2 is given below.