According to research, participating in regular physical activity including walking, cycling, cleaning, gardening and playing sports could reduce the risk of Parkinson’s disease. The study revealed that people who exercised more had a 25% reduced risk of Parkinson’s compared to people who exercised less.
Exercise is a low-cost way to improve overall health, so the researchers wanted to determine whether it might be associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s, a debilitating disease with no cure. The findings present evidence for planning treatments to help prevent Parkinson’s disease.
The study involved 95,354 women with an average age of 49 who did not have Parkinson’s at the start of the study. They were followed up for 30 years during which 1,074 of them developed Parkinson’s disease.
Individuals completed up to 6 questionnaires about the amount and type of physical activity they performed during the study. They reported the amount of flights of stairs climbed and the distance traveled each day, how many hours were allocated to household activities, and also the amount of time spent engaging in moderate recreational activities that included gardening and more vigorous activities that included sports.
Each activity was assigned a score based on the metabolic equivalent of an activity, or MET, a method for quantifying energy expenditure. The METs were multiplied by the duration and frequency of each activity to obtain a weekly physical activity score for METs.
For example, a more intense type of exercise such as cycling was 6 METs, and less intense types of exercise that included cleaning and walking were 3 METs. At the start of the study, the average level of physical activity for the individuals was 45 MET hours each week.
The individuals were divided into 4 even groups of approximately 24,000 individuals each. At the start of the study, the group with the highest activity levels had a weekly physical activity score of 71 METs-hours on average. The group with the lowest activity levels averaged a weekly score of 27 METs-hours.
There were 246 Parkinson’s cases or 0.55 cases per 1,000 person-years in the group with the highest levels of exercise compared with 286 cases or 0.73 per 1,000 person-years in the group with the lowest levels of exercise. Person-years represent the amount of time each individual participates in the study and the number of study participants.
After adjusting for factors including place of residence, menopausal status and age at first period, and smoking status, the group with the highest levels of exercise was observed to have a 25% reduction in the Parkinson’s rate compared to the group with the lowest levels of exercise when physical activity was assessed up to 10 years before diagnosis; the association remained the same when physical activity was assessed up to 15 or 20 years before diagnosis. Similar results were seen after adjustment for diet or conditions including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and hypertension.
Normal physical activity was also observed to decline more rapidly in individuals with Parkinson’s 10 years prior to diagnosis than in individuals without Parkinson’s, possibly due to early Parkinson’s symptoms.
Not only did this study find that women who exercised more had a reduced rate of Parkinson’s, but it also determined that early Parkinson’s symptoms are unlikely to explain these findings, and rather that exercise is beneficial and could help to prevent or delay this condition. The findings support the development of exercise programs to help reduce the risk of Parkinson’s.
One limitation of the study was that they were mostly health-conscious participants, so the results may not be the same for the general population. The study doesn’t prove that exercise reduces the risk of Parkinson’s, it just shows a connection.
Photo by Annick Vanblaere from Pixabay
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