Hasibul Haque is a full-time PhD student in the school, jointly supervised by Dr John Burne and by Dr Ian Cathers.

His PhD project is “The study on tonic stretch reflex and tonic vibration reflex in Huntington’s disease patients.” Huntington’s disease (HD) is a hyperkinetic disorder presenting with motor disturbances including chorea, dystonia, and rigidity. Preliminary reports indicate the presence of reflex abnormalities in HD. Though the reflex contribution to the movement disorder is unclear, it is likely that stretch reflexes may contribute to the muscle rigidity seen in these patients. A better understanding of the reflex mechanisms could be of immense value to therapy. Reflex measures may also produce much needed disease markers. The present proposed study is designed to study in detail the stretch reflex response in HD patients in terms of reflex gain, phase relationships and delay using a continuous perturbation over low (TSR) and high (TVR) frequency bands. This would be the first reported study of the TSR and TVR in HD.

His research has resulted in the following papers

1. Haque ARNMH & Burne JA. (2004). Effect of voluntary contraction on tonic stretch reflex gain in different stretch frequencies. Presented on 2004 Research Conference - College of Health Sciences at Leura (Prog no 25-11).
2. Haque ARNMH Burne JA (2004). Ischemia sensitivity of the tonic stretch reflex of the ankle dorsiflexor over an extended frequency range of 25-60 Hz. Accepted for the conference of The Society of Neural Control of Movement to be held in March, 2004 in Spain.
3. Leao RN, Haque ARNMH & Burne JA (2004). Evaluation of stretch reflex responses in the frequency domain, using continuous wavelet transform. Proceedings of The Australian Neuroscience Society, 15: 107.
4. Burne JA & Haque ARNMH (2003). The effect of prolonged ischemia on the tonic stretch reflex of the tibialis anterior muscle and stiffness of the ankle joint.  Proceedings of Australian Physiological and Pharmacological Society, 33:39P.
5. Haque ARNMH & Burne JA (2003). The effect of background contraction and prolonged ischemia on the tendon reflex. Proceedings of Australian Physiological and Pharmacological Society, 33:40P.
6. Haque ARNMH, Burne JA & Turman AB (2003). The ischemic response the stretch reflex at different stretch frequencies. Presented in the 33rd conference of SFN in New Orleans, USA.
7. Janan F, Abedin J,  Haque H & Bobby S (2002). Short term regulation of blood pressure with ACE inhibitor and receptor blocker. Presented in the 26th International Congress of Internal Medicine, Kyoto, Japan.

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