EFFECTIVENESS OF GAZE STABILITY EXERCISES ON BALANCE IN HEALTHY ELDERLY POPULATION

Purpose: To determine whether gaze stability exercises are effective in improving the balance disturbance and related confidence in healthy elderly population. Design: Randomized pre-test and post-test experimental design. Setting: Superspeciality hospital setup. Participants: 30 subjects without any definite balance disorder but with history of subjective apprehension attending the outpatient physiotherapy department of BLK Superspeciality hospital, New Delhi, were selected for the study. Intervention: The experimental group (n=15) performed gaze stability exercises (GSE), and the control group (n=15) performed placebo eye movements. Weekly progression of exercise was done as per the designed exercise protocol. Total time for placebo eye exercises was matched to the time the GSE group spent performing gaze stability exercises. The participants performed the exercises 3 times daily over a 6-week period. Outcome measures: Participants were evaluated at baseline and after 6 weeks of intervention using the Berg Balance Scale (BBS) and the activities-specific balance confidence scale (ABC) outcome measures for assessing the balance and subjective confidence of balance respectively. Result: There were no baseline differences (P ? .05) between the GSE and CON groups in age and sex, or any outcome measures. GSE group improved significantly in both the outcome measures compared with the control group. Conclusion: The results of this study suggest us that vestibular-specific gaze stability exercises leads to improvement of balance and subjective confidence to carry out the activities of daily life due to adaptation of VOR reflex in age related vestibulo-ocular reflex degeneration (VOR) found in healthy elderly population.