I attended the first two lectures of Friday afternoon’s session, “Exercise as Treatment,” during the closing hours of the World Parkinson Congress. Rather than write up all my notes, I’ll just discuss my main take-aways. So much information spewed out of the microphone on stage, especially during the first lecture, that I felt like I was standing under Niagara Falls and trying to track every drop of water that rushed by.
The two speakers were Giselle Petzinger (“Biological effects of exercise in Parkinson’s disease”) and Lynn Rochester (“The impact of exercise on physical and cognitive function in PD”). The two talks complemented each other. And I’m sure when they left the session, the two presenters complimented each other, too.
So here’s what most struck me:
- Everyone with Parkinson’s needs to exercise. Lynn showed the above picture of pudgy Homer Simpson sitting in his underpants on a sofa. I don’t know if this was her pun or mine, but in my notes I wrote “There’s a large body of evidence that inactivity leads to many health hazards.” Elsewhere in my notes: “Brain circuitry is dynamic. Synaptic connections are lost for people with PD, but re-established by exercise.”
- Five types of exercise are good for repairing/restoring brain functionings. These exercises work on one or more of the following: balance, flexibility, endurance, strength, and skill training. It’s probably best if you include all of these in your workout regime. For example, take a yoga class on Monday (balance, flexibility); run outdoors or on a treadmill on Tuesday (endurance, strength). The exact wording in my notes: “You need to do a variety of exercise for a maximum transfer of benefits.” Also: “How you exercise affects different repair mechanisms in the brain circuitry.” Also: “You can target important regions of the brain by choosing your exercise.”
- Ten or twenty years ago, there were very few studies that looked at how exercise could benefit people with Parkinson’s. But in recent years, thousands of studies have been carried out, involving thousands of volunteers. This has allowed for meta-analyses, where a research team will review a gazillion different studies and arrive at some clear conclusions. (For an early example of such a meta-analysis, click to read my review of a 2013 Lancet article that examined over 100 exercise-related experiments.)
- You get more bang for your buck when you try a motor-cognitive combo exercise. The most fascinating example of this was an experiment with mice who had to run on the inside of a wheel. Here’s an example of this kind of wheel, which I downloaded from the Internet (BTW, the picture shows a hamster, not a mouse):
The mice were divided into two groups. The control group mice were forced to run on a wheel that had a smooth surface inside – like you see in the photo. For these mice, the workout was merely aerobic. The mice in the other group had to run on a wheel that was a series of rungs inside, which forced them to not only run fast but think about where they were placing their feet.
Giselle showed slides comparing the brains of the two groups. The brain of the control group was lit up in certain areas, showing that these areas were activated during the running experiment. The brain of the experimental group was lit up in the same areas as well as many other areas. In particular, there was more blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, which is the section that, in the human brain, deals with some of the very mental skills that people with Parkinson’s lose: executive function and attention.
What does this mean for me? Just this: You don’t have to convince me to exercise regularly. But I need to select more carefully the kinds of exercise I engage in.
