Fig. 5

Temporal gait pattern changes following MCLT sham and MCLT + MMT surgery in the rat. a Temporal symmetry was used to investigate the synchronicity of the foot strike pattern in time, where a temporal symmetry near 0.5 indicates the foot strike of the right limb temporally occurs halfway between two left limb foot strikes. At week 1 and week 4, temporal asymmetries were greater than 0.5 in the MCLT + MMT group (p < 0.001 and p = 0.03, respectively), indicating that the time to transition from left to right foot strike was longer than the time to transition from right to left foot strike. b Stance time imbalance occurs when more time is spent on one limb relative to its contralateral limb. An imbalance greater than 0.0 was observed at week 1 in the MCLT + MMT group (p = 0.003), indicating that more time was spent on the left limb than on the right limb. Conversely, an imbalance less than 0.0 was observed at week 6 in the MCLT + MMT group (p = 0.048), indicating that more time was spent on the right limb than on the left limb. c Temporal gait compensations generally reduce the single-limb support phase spent on the injured limb. In the case of unilateral injuries, a reduced single-limb support phase is observed on the injured limb only. In conjunction with stance time imbalance findings in b, reduced right, but not left, single-limb support phases were found in the MCLT + MMT group at week 1 (p = 0.03). In bilateral compensations, single-limb support is reduced on both limbs of a limb pair. A bilateral compensation can be observed through reduced single-limb support phases in both limbs of both the MCLT sham and MCLT + MMT groups at week 4 and week 6 (p < 0.001 in all groups). Data are presented as mean ± SEM. MCLT medial collateral ligament transection, MMT medial meniscus transection