Can Motor Arrests in Other Effectors Be Used as Valid Markers of Freezing of Gait?

Construct Validity of Freezing in Other Effectors As for construct validity of non-gait freezing, a review on freezing episodes in a variety of tasks, i.e., handwriting, hand and foot tapping and speech revealed that the clinical manifestation of these events appeared to be overlapping (Vercruysse et al., 2014a). [...]the most optimal method to elicit freezing in other effectors (high speed conditions) was not always employed, which may have precluded the events from occurring. [...]it could be that people without FOG but with freezing in other body parts have a higher likelihood to convert to FOG showing the potential for repetitive movement paradigms to serve as predictive markers for FOG. Predictive Validity of Freezing in Other Effectors Prospective study conducted by Delval et al. demonstrated, that episodic events during foot-tapping, hand-tapping, and syllable repetition in early-stage PD patients without FOG were predictive of FOG emerging in the next two years, albeit in a small cohort of 30 subjects (Delval et al., 2016).