PT professor awarded major grants to develop functional balance and fall prevention interventions
Tanvi Bhatt, PT professor and director of the Cognitive Motor Balance Rehabilitation Lab, was recently awarded two major grants, exceeding $1.5 million and $3 million, from the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institute on Aging. The grants will facilitate research on functional balance intervention and fall prevention.
Bhatt’s first grant, awarded by the U.S. Department of Defense in the amount of $1,599,997, will support a three-year study on functional balance interventions for people with multiple sclerosis, a condition that affects approximately one million adults in the U.S. Of those affected, more than 80% have physical impairments, including muscle weakness, spasticity and balance issues, Bhatt explained. Up to 60% experience cognitive impairment, such as slowed thinking, poor problem-solving or memory difficulties, and up to 30% will develop severe dementia.
“There are numerous studies researching treatments to improve physical function,” Bhatt said, “but treatments targeting cognitive function are still in early stages.”
Bhatt’s study will explore how functional balance training might treat cognitive impairments in multiple sclerosis patients, since “there is an overlap of neural resources between cognitive tasks and balance control.”
Participants will complete an hour-long training session twice per week for 16 weeks, performing exercises for functional agility, functional strength, dual tasks (i.e., exercises targeting cognitive and motor domains simultaneously) and vestibular function.
Bhatt’s second grant, awarded by the National Institute on Aging, will support a five-year, $3,090,725 study on the potential of task-specific balance training to reduce falls in aging adults. The project is a renewal of her previous NIA-funded clinical trial, which investigated the effects of perturbation training on fall risk in community-dwelling older adults. Perturbation training simulates occasions for tripping or slipping on a specially designed overground walkway, Bhatt explained.
“While overground perturbation training was extremely effective, it’s difficult to transfer from lab settings into clinical settings, as it requires a large space and complex, expensive technology. It also may cause older adults anxiety — especially those who have a fear of falling.”
Bhatt’s new task-specific balance training model targets root causes of falls in older adults using only low-cost equipment and small, predictable perturbation exposures. The goal is to increase the accessibility of effective fall prevention training.
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Over the past decade, the Cognitive Motor Balance Rehabilitation Lab has designed mechanistically driven rehabilitation paradigms to improve balance and prevent falls among diverse clinical populations. Both of these new studies aim to develop interventions that can be feasibly implemented in clinical or community settings, emphasizing functional, real-world relevance and enhancing participants’ everyday lives.