P7 – 2957: EEG modulation in cerebral palsy and healthy children during action observation compared to execution

Objectives The observation of actions (such as reaching and grasping movements) was proposed as a rehabilitation tool, for upper limb motor impairment following stroke in adults (see Buccino et al., 2014) and, recently (Sgandurra, 2011), in children affected by Cerebral Palsy (CP). However, despites preliminary data in children demonstrated the effectiveness of these rehabilitation protocols, the underlying neural mechanisms are still poorly understood. In this study we evaluate how different parameters related to motor processing are jointly affected by CP, considering clinical and functional scales, as well as neurophysiological measures. Methods We acquired electroencephalographic signal (EEG) of 8 CP children (3 F, 5 M, mean age 8 Y, SD 2Y) and of 8 age and sex matched control healthy children (CC). All subjects performed 2 tasks: reaching/grasping action execution (AE) and action observation (AO). As a neurophysiological measure we considered event related desyncronization (ERD) in the mu frequency band (8–13 Hz) which is a neural correlate of motor processes (Pfurtscheller 1997). For all considered measures, we evaluated the GROUP and CONDITION effects using post hoc ANOVA. Results We found that both action execution and action observation elicited a mu desynchronization, not only in healthy controls, but, importantly, also in CP children. However, as expected, the mu ERD was stronger in CC than in CP. Conclusions The fact that the mere observation of actions elicit cortical activations related to motor processing also IN children affected by CP supports the role of this technique in rehabilitative protocols. Therefore, our data suggest that mu ERD may be used as reliable marker of neural plasticity during action observation trainings.