Sex differences in quadrupedal walking gaits of Uner Tan syndrome cases, healthy humans and nonhuman primates.

BACKGROUND: Uner Tan syndrome (UTS) cases with habitual quadrupedal locomotion (QL), impaired intelligence, and dysarthric or no speech predominantly use lateral sequence (LS) gait like nonprimates rather than the predominantly diagonal sequence (DS) gait of nonhuman primates. However, these studies neglected possible sex-related differences in these gait types.

OBJECTIVES: (1) To assess the possible sex-related gait types in UTS cases, healthy infants and adults with requested QL, and the nonhuman primates. (2) To test the hypothesis that sex differences may exist in quadrupedal walking gaits in UTS cases, healthy humans, and nonhuman primates.

METHODS: The UTS cases were filmed, the other study groups were taken from public open 'youtube' videos, which were used to assess the walking gait types as DS and LS. The right and left hind-limb phase values were calculated separately for males and females to allow a possible sex difference in walking gaits to be determined.

RESULTS: Females predominantly used DS gait, contrary to males with predominantly LS gait.

CONCLUSIONS: Consistent with the working hypothesis, the results suggested a biological sex-related trend in preferred walking gaits exists in all of the human and nonhuman primates using QL.