Age- and Sex-Based Differences in Gait Pattern Characteristics Among Adults Over 50: A Cross-Sectional Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVE: Walking is essential for maintaining functional independence, and understanding gait changes due to aging is crucial, as chronic conditions often overlap with normal aging. The objective of this study was to describe gait characteristics in adults aged 50 and over and to identify differences between age groups and between sexes. METHODS: The study included 34 adults aged 50-59, 38 adults aged 60-69, and 28 adults aged 70+ years. Participant characteristics (age, sex, height, weight, and comorbidities) were collected. Participants walked a 30-m round trip at a self-selected pace. Gait was measured using inertial measurement units. RESULTS: Results showed that stride length, stride velocity, push-off ratio, and minimal toe clearance decreased with age (p < .03) and flat-foot ratio increased with age (p < .01), while cadence, walking phases (stance, swing, double support, and loading ratio), and maximal heel clearance were similar across age groups (p > .05). Males had a lower cadence, a longer stride, and a higher maximal heel clearance than females (p < .04). Stride velocity and minimal toe clearance were similar between sexes (p > .05). CONCLUSIONS: This study found that stride length and velocity decrease with age, and notable sex differences exist in stride length and maximal heel clearance. These findings underscore the importance of considering both age and sex when assessing walking and functional capacity in older adults. Significance/Implications: Aging impacts gait, and inertial measurement units offer a valuable tool to examine how age and sex affect walking. This is an initial step toward a deeper understanding of gait characteristics in older adults.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".