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Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

Finger-tapping patterns linked to motor reserve in adults

Three of five tapping measures remained linked to motor reserve questionnaire scores after accounting for age in 100 healthy younger and older adults.

Paper by David Vagni, Emanuela Principe, Melissa Pirrotta, Show 9 more authorsAntonio Cerasa
Figure 1. Analytical workflow. Raw glove parameters are reduced by preprocessing to the informative set, from which an exploratory analysis on the older subsample alone generated five candidate axes; the…
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Figure 1. Analytical workflow. Raw glove parameters are reduced by preprocessing to the informative set, from which an exploratory analysis on the older subsample alone…Analytical workflow. Raw glove parameters are reduced by preprocessing to the informative set, from which an exploratory analysis on the older subsample alone generated five candidate axes; the axes, their composition rule, and their predicted signs were locked before the younger…Vagni et al.
Cross-sectional study of 100 peopleBiomarkers

Registered NCT07634055

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In an observational study, 100 healthy adults—50 older and 50 younger—performed four finger-tapping tasks while wearing a sensor-equipped glove. They tapped at their own pace, as fast as possible, to a metronome, and after it stopped. A questionnaire assessed motor reserve, the capacity to maintain movement despite aging-related or disease-related changes.

After accounting for age, three measures remained associated with questionnaire scores: timing stability without external cues, differences between hands in contact duration, and consistency across tasks. Speed during metronome-paced tapping tracked age rather than reserve. A combined index of the three retained measures predicted questionnaire scores in the older group in validation analyses.

Why it matters

The work addresses how to distinguish people's capacity to maintain movement during aging from the effects of chronological age or overall movement speed.

Caveats

This observational study linked tapping measures to a questionnaire, not to observed resilience against aging-related or disease-related changes. It included only 100 healthy adults in deliberately separate younger and older age groups.

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