Sex Differences in Motor Unit Behavior in Patients With Parkinson's Disease

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2025

Publisher

Wiley

Source Publication

European Journal of Neuroscience

Source ISSN

0953-816X

Original Item ID

DOI: 10.1111/ejn.70191

Abstract

The aim of this study was to determine whether there are sex differences in motor unit firing behavior in patients with Parkinson's disease. Twenty-seven patients with Parkinson's disease (females = 14 [age = 71.1 ± 6.8], males = 13 [age = 69.2 ± 10.3], Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale Part III score; females = 10.8 ± 4.8, males = 11.4 ± 1.4) performed a contraction at 30% of the maximal voluntary contraction. For each participant, motor unit spike trains were decomposed from high-density surface electromyography data recorded from bilateral vastus lateralis muscles via blind source separation algorithms. In addition to the mean discharge rates, persistent inward currents were estimated via a paired motor unit analysis. Females presented significantly greater laterality of discharge rate (p = 0.001) and persistent inward currents (p = 0.0121) than males. A significant correlation was observed between the discharge rate and the recruitment threshold on the bilateral side of males and the less-affected side of females but not on the more-affected side of females. These findings indicate that sex differences in motor unit behavior exist in Parkinson's disease patients. Motor unit behavior may be a sensitive and quantitative evaluation tool to highlight differences in disease presentation between males and females.

Comments

European Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 62, No. 1 (July 2025). DOI.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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