Parkinson’s patients improve with innovative Waterloo program

Opied from The Northwest Parkinson’s Foundation Weekly News Update

Johanna Weidner

The Record - Bill Watson thought he was managing OK with Parkinson’s, at least until the Cambridge man joined a special exercise program designed to reduce symptoms of the debilitating disease.

Then he realized just how much better he was moving after just a few weeks.

“I noticed what I would call a fairly dramatic improvement,” said the 57-year-old. “I’m much more flexible. I’m much more capable in my movements.”

Best of all, he’s far more able to do the tasks of daily life, even something as basic as walking up and down the stairs of his home.

Watson is enlisted in the innovative exercise program developed at the Sun Life Financial Movement Disorders Research and Rehabilitation Centre at Wilfrid Laurier University.

The centre’s goal, explained director and associate professor Quincy Almeida, is using research and rehabilitation to immediately benefit Parkinson’s patients — to improve the lives of people like Watson.

Recently published research shows their specially designed exercises do just that. People with Parkinson’s disease who joined the 12-week program experienced significant improvements in skills affected by the neurological disease, such as walking, balance and co-ordination.

And when they were assessed again weeks later, those benefits lingered. The disease’s progression had been slowed.

“This is certainly a first for exercise rehabilitation,” Almeida said.

It’s perhaps the best hope for Parkinson’s patients as there has been little progress in combating the disease.

April is Parkinson’s disease awareness month. More than 100,000 Canadians have Parkinson’s disease, and people as young as 30 can be affected.

Parkinson’s is a neurodegenerative disease where cells producing the chemical that carries signals controlling movement between nerves in the brain die. The most common symptoms are tremor, slowness and stiffness, impaired balance and rigidity of the muscles. Other symptoms include fatigue, soft speech, stooped posture and sleep disturbances.

Almeida will share the centre’s latest research at a public talk on April 9 on the Laurier campus.

The idea for the exercise program came from earlier research that lead the centre’s experts to look differently at a severe symptom of Parkinson’s. Freezing is when a person can’t move from where they’re standing.

“Their feet literally feel like they’re stuck to the ground and they can’t lift them,” Almeida said.

It was thought the impairment was caused by the brain not properly sending signals to the body to move. The centre’s findings, which will be published this month in another journal, suggest the problem could be caused by sensory and perceptual issues.

“This freezing may not actually be a problem in the brain,” Almeida said.

That’s how they got the idea to design a rehabilitation program that tackles sensory perception to help Parkinson’s patients with movement difficulties — “exercise that helps you co-ordinate how your limbs are moving,” he said.

Basically, the patients perform specific exercises with their eyes closed to retrain their body how to do certain movements. One group in the study did the exercises with their eyes closed and the other with open eyes.

“The group that had done everything with their eyes closed was much better off,” Almeida said.

Certainly Watson noticed how movements, such as lunges were far more difficult when he closed his eyes. His body had to figure out how to do the movement when it could no longer depend on visual cues.

Participants didn’t just improve in those practised movements, but also in functional measures of how they do in daily activities. For instance, researchers measured the time it took a person to stand up from a chair, take a few steps and then back to the chair. That’s simple for an average person, but a challenging set of movements for someone suffering with Parkinson’s.

Researchers also studied strength training exercises and found that while benefits came with strengthening exercises for Parkinson’s, they were temporary. Many types of exercise have been attempted with Parkinson’s patients, most having no measurable effect on the disease’s symptoms, Almeida said.

Today’s medication can only mask symptoms to help people function better in daily life. The centre’s purpose is finding rehabilitation techniques that are scientifically proven, and then sharing that information across the country to help Parkinson’s patients enjoy a better quality of life.

“Our goal was to find something that people would eventually be able to do in their home.”

 

Not by John Pepper:

The statement in the penultimate paragraph is not correct. All but one type of medication only mask symptoms. The only type that does not mask symptoms but does affect the progression of Parkinson’s disease is the MAO-b inhibitors, namely Azilect, Eldepryl and Parkyline.