The relationship between body awareness, balance control and proprioception among elderly

Body awareness is the process of understanding the various states of the body, processes and reactions that are supposed to derive from sensory, interoceptive and proprioceptive paths and that a person has the ability to be attentive of. Balance is a rapid synergistic cooperation between different physiologic and cognitive factors that allow fast and precise feedback to a perturbation. Proprioception is a sense that analyses position, motion and equilibrium from the combination of physical and neurological stimuli. The purpose of this study is to figure out the relationship for the key factors within elderly population including body awareness, balance control and proprioception at the same time. 48 participants were included in the study (40 females, 8 males, mean age ±69.08). Body Awareness Questionnaire (BAQ) was used for body awareness evaluation and Mini-BESTest for balance control assessment. For proprioception, joint position sense, motion sense and Romberg test were measured. BAQ did not show any significance relationship with age, balance control and proprioception (p>0.05). Strong relationship was found in the correlation of balance and the age of participants, showing that when age was increasing, balance score was decreasing (p<0.05). Between balance and proprioception correlation, meaningful relationship was found only in the joint position sense assessment, in one direction of the measured joints. No meaningful relationship was found between age of participants and proprioception, except with one direction in joint position sense (p<0.05). Within the measurements of joint position sense, meaningful relationships between joint scores was present in both assessed legs. (p<0.05) Despite the mentioned results, we conclude that ageing affects balance control in elderly, and proprioception could be affected by age and balance control either.