Rhythmic auditory stimulation in gait training for patients with traumatic brain injury

Rhythmic auditory stimulation (RAS) was studied in a frequency entrainment design and as a therapeutic stimulus to facilitate gait patterns in 8 traumatically brain injured individuals (5 male/3 female; mean age 30 +/- 5 years) with persisting gait disorder, 4-24 months postinjury. During entrainment, with RAS frequency matched to baseline cadence, velocity and stride symmetry both increased by an average of 18%. Increases contributing to the velocity improvement were seen in both stride length (7%) and cadence (8%). With RAS accelerated 5% over the fast walking step rate of the patients, 5 patients could entrain to a higher step frequency. The 2 patients with the slowest baseline gait velocity could not entrain to faster RAS frequencies. After 5 weeks of daily RAS training, 5 patients' mean velocity increased significantly (p <.05) by 51% (38.8 m/min to 57.6 m/min; p <.43). cadence (+16%) and stride length (+29%) also showed statistically significant improvement. Stride symmetry improved nonsignificantly by 12%.