The aim of this study was to compare postural adjustments in healthy adults and adults with HTLV-1 with and without tropical spastic paraparesis / HTLV-1 associated myelopathy (PET/MAH) during a pointing task in the standing posture. We compared the results of the postural assessment between the group formed by healthy individuals and the group formed by individuals infected with HTLV-1, in addition to comparing subgroups between HTLV-1 group without PET/MAH, HTLV-1 group with PET/MAH and control group. A force platform was used to record the postural oscillations during the pointing task. The analyzed variables form COPonset, COPapa, COPtimetopeak and COPtotaldisplacement. Twenty-six subjects participated in the research. A worse performance of the infected group, in the variables COPonset (p=0.0030), COPtimetopeak (p=0.0017) and COPapa (p=0.0040), there was no significant difference in total displacement (p=0.8154) . The PET/MAH group showed worse performance than the control group in the COPonset (p=0.0201) and COPtimetopeak (p=0.0130) variables than the control group, however, in the COPapa variable (p=0.0194), the group HTLV and PET/MAH were significantly different from the control group. We can conclude that the HTLV-1 infection impairs the performance in the APAs, being aggravated by the presence of PET/MAH, alterations that can come from the proprioception deficit and the adopted posture due to muscular weakness and shortenings.
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