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 “Exercise is medicine for Parkinson’s,” Jay Alberts, from the
Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute in Ohio, told Reuters
Health.
“This shows it doesn’t necessarily have to be super high-intensity
exercise,” Alberts said. He studies motor function in Parkinson’s
disease but wasn’t involved in the new research.
The study included 60 people with mild to moderate Parkinson’s
disease who could walk independently without a cane or walker and
had no other serious medical problems.
Researchers had the participants walk briskly, at an average pace of
2.9 miles per hour, three times a week for six months. Each walking
session lasted 45 minutes. Participants kept diaries of each session
and had trainers to help choose walking routes and collect the
diaries.
When researchers compared results from a battery of tests conducted
before and after the six months of regular walks, they found
participants’ motor function, fitness, mood, tiredness, memory and
thinking abilities all improved during the study, on average.
At first some participants also tried interval training -
alternating every three minutes between slower and faster speeds -
but researchers started assigning all new participants to continuous
speed walking when knee pain became a problem in the interval group.
There were no such side effects in the continuous speed group,
according to results published in Neurology.
“We observed seven to 15 percent improvement in various symptoms
that appeared to be clinically meaningful,” Dr. Ergun Uc told
Reuters Health in an email. He led the study at the University of
Iowa in Iowa City.
This was only a preliminary study, called a phase I/II trial, but Uc
said he has applied for phase III trial funding to continue the
research.
One limitation of the current study is that it didn’t include a
group of patients who did not walk regularly for comparison.
It’s hard to compare the effectiveness of medications to that of
exercise since they probably work in different ways, Uc said. He
prefers to think of exercise as supplemental to medical treatment,
which patients can explore with guidance from their doctors.
With a doctor’s permission, certain patients may be able to follow
the aerobic component of physical activity guidelines from the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, which recommend 150 minutes
of aerobic exercise, which should feel “somewhat hard,” per week, he
said.
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Uc added that people with Parkinson’s disease may be discouraged
from exercising due to poor general health, lack of knowledge and
appreciation of the benefits of exercise, time constraints, lack of
an appropriate exercise environment, depression or fear of injury
and falls.
“This is probably one of the hottest topics in Parkinson’s research
right now,” said Beth Fisher, who studies exercise and Parkinson’s
disease at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She
was not part of the new research.
Researchers tend to focus on the physical symptoms of Parkinson’s,
like tremor, but non-motor effects are important too, Alberts said.
“This should 100 percent be a part of the treatment program,” he
said. “As long as they can do these things in a safe manner and
don’t have any other orthopedic reasons (not to exercise), I’m not
sure there’s any reason not to recommend exercise.”
“Even if there aren’t motor benefits, there are improvements in
mood, fatigue, aerobic fitness - all of these things,” he said.
There will always be debate about the optimal type, amount and
intensity of exercise, he said, and researchers will probably never
have a precise answer because every person is different. But the
aerobic component seems to be the important part, he said.
“I always say, what do you love doing and what can you scale up in
difficulty?” Fisher told Reuters Health. “If you love walking and
you’re doing it from point A to point B every day outside for x
amount of time, how about doing it in less time?”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/NwhhyY
Neurology, online July 2, 2014.
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reserved.] Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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