STEPPING OUT aims to discover more about the mechanisms of gait instability and falls risk in older people, including how they use their senses to gather information about the world around them and use this to control movements. This understanding will inform future developments to intervene and prevent falls. The interdisciplinary team is led by Principal Investigator Professor Sallie Lamb at the University of Exeter in collaboration with Professor Clemens Becker at the University of Heidelberg.
Professor Sallie Lamb is Director of the NIHR Exeter Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) is the first of its kind in the South West Peninsula. A partnership between the University and the NHS, the BRC will translate scientific discoveries into tangible benefits for patients.
Funded with more than £15 million from NIHR, the new BRC is led by the University of Exeter and the Royal Devon University Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. It will help the partners run more clinical trials to get effective treatments into the clinic where they can benefit people and improve diagnoses. It will also accelerate the development of better precision approaches to target the right therapies to the right people using cutting edge technologies.
Freezing of Gait (FOG) is one of the most disabling features of advanced Parkinson’s. Often described as the sensation of one’s feet being ‘stuck’ to the ground, affected individuals often avoid leaving their homes for fear of falling or embarrassment.
As freezing is exacerbated by anxiety, sports psychologists are well-placed to design strategies that might help people allocate attention in more efficient ways to avoid freezing or initiate a step from a freeze during anxiety-provoking situations.
This project involves the development and evaluation of a range of strategies that might help people to overcome freezing, not only in laboratory settings, but in daily life both inside and outside their homes.
The word delirium describes when a person become suddenly confused or more confused than usual. It affects a quarter of older people who come into hospital. Delirium is usually caused by an illness such as an infection. Many people take months to recover their memory and thinking skills, and some never recover completely. Previous research has looked at how to prevent and treat delirium while people are in hospital but there has been little research into how to improve people’s recovery after delirium.
This programme aims to develop and test a package of activities (intervention) to help people recover from delirium at home. We will work with a panel of experts and people with lived experience to plan our intervention. Then we will run a small study to test out our intervention with some people who have had delirium. Following the small study, we plan to run a full randomised controlled trial to see if our intervention works and is good value for money.
