Metabolic costs of walking and arm reaching in persons with mild multiple sclerosis

Movement slowness is a common and disruptive symptom of multiple sclerosis (MS). A potential cause is that individuals with MS slow down to conserve energy as a behavioral adjustment to heightened metabolic costs of movement. To investigate this prospect, we measured the metabolic costs of both walking and seated arm reaching at five speeds in persons with mild MS (pwMS; n = 13; 46.0 +/- 7.7 yr) and sex-and age-matched controls (HCs; n = 13; 45.8 +/- 7.8 yr). Notably, the cohort of pwMS was highly mobile and no individuals required a cane or aid when walking. We found that the net metabolic power of walking was approximately 20% higher for pwMS across all speeds (P = 0.0185). In contrast, we found no differences in the gross power of reaching between pwMS and HCs (P = 0.492). Collectively, our results suggest that abnormal slowness of movement in MS-par-ticularly reaching-is not the consequence of heightened effort costs and that other sensorimotor mechanisms are playing a con-siderable role in slowing.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) often move more slowly than those without the disease. A possi-ble cause is that movements in MS are more energetically expensive and slowing is an adaptation to conserve metabolic resour-ces. Here, we find that while walking is more costly for persons with MS, arm-reaching movements are not. These results bring into question the driving force of movement slowness in MS and implicate other motor-related networks contributing to slowing.

Automated summary

Movement slowness is a common and disruptive symptom of multiple sclerosis (MS). This study found that the metabolic costs of walking were significantly higher for individuals with MS, while there were no differences in the metabolic costs of arm-reaching movements. These results suggest that movement slowness in MS may be influenced by other sensorimotor mechanisms.