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Exercise benefits people with Parkinson disease
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Exercise benefits people with Parkinson disease
Are some types of physical exercise more beneficial than others for people with Parkinson disease?
This review found evidence of beneficial effects on the severity of motor signs, quality of life, and functional mobility and balance for most types of physical exercise for people with Parkinson disease. For severity of motor signs, dance appeared to be most beneficial, and aqua-based training appeared to have the highest benefits for quality of life.
Overall, differences between the exercise types were not large. This highlights the importance of physical exercise for people with Parkinson disease in general, while the exact exercise type might be secondary with respect to the outcome measures of severity of motor signs and quality of life. Therefore, personal preferences should be given special consideration.
No major safety concerns were raised for the interventions included in this review. Therefore, several exercise programmes may be selected from when establishing a training routine, provided there are no individual safety concerns. Importantly, as the disease progresses, safety concerns may increase and the availability of safe exercise options may decrease.
Larger, well-conducted studies are needed to increase confidence in the evidence, which ranged from moderate to very low in this review. Furthermore, although there was very little evidence of differences in the effects of different types of exercise, it is possible differences do exist that might be clinically relevant.
Parkinson disease is a progressive disorder of the nervous system that mostly affects people over the age of 60. Symptoms begin gradually and include movement problems, such as trembling, stiffness, slowness of movement, and coordination and balance issues. The disorder cannot be cured, but the symptoms can be relieved. People with Parkinson disease may benefit from physiotherapy or other forms of physical exercise, such as dancing, but it remains unclear whether some of these exercise types work better than others.
Ernst M, et al. Physical exercise for people with Parkinson’s disease: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. Cochrane Database Syst Rev 2024;4:CD013856. This review contains 154 trials with a total of 7837 participants.