How physiotherapy can help people with Parkinson’s Disease - Parkinson’s Awareness Month 2019
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April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month so I’ve written this blog post to raise awareness of how physiotherapy can help those with Parkinson’s Disease.
Physiotherapy can help manage the symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease through movement and exercise which relieves muscle stiffness and joint pain and in turn helps people to improve their flexibility, balance and walking.
It is recommended in National Clinical Guidelines (NICE) that people who are in the early stages of Parkinson’s should be referred to a physiotherapist with experience of Parkinson’s for assessment, education and advice including information about physical activity.
Symptoms of Parkinson’s, typically but not always, include the developing of a stooped posture, short shuffling steps, stiffening muscles and tremors. People who have these symptoms can develop problems with day-to-day tasks such as standing up from a chair, walking with an altered gait pattern, losing balance and falling. Another common symptom can be ‘freezing’. This can occur at anytime and results in the person becoming stuck on the spot when they are walking and it can often be when trying to negotiate going through a doorway. A physiotherapist with experience of treating people with Parkinson’s will be able to offer techniques and strategies to help overcome these problems.
In the early stages of the disease, from diagnosis onwards, it is now strongly recommended for people to increase their activity level and the type of activity that they do. This is very important as it has been shown that doing 2.5 hours of exercise per week can slow down the symptoms of Parkinson’s, which is a disease that is progressive and with no cure at present.
A recent study within the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease from 2017 discovered that those with Parkinson’s who exercised 2.5 hours per week had a smaller decline in mobility and quality of life scores over 2 years, than those who did no exercise at all.
In the early stages, it is best to focus on activities which are going to be challenging but will help to develop strength, flexibility and aerobic capacity. Examples of activities include; racket sports, cycling, running, swimming or other similar high intensity style workouts.
As symptoms progress, it is best to stay as active as possible but with an increased focus on maintaining strength with resistance training using bands and activities which challenge balance and co-ordination, alongside many other hobbies with an activity element to them such as golf, dance, swimming, yoga and Pilates.
If the symptoms have progressed making access to the wider community difficult, keeping up activity levels in the home is important and the focus will shift to developing ways to manage certain mobility issues and balance as discussed earlier on. Interestingly, the recent study discussed before actually showed that those who had advanced disease had the greatest increase in quality of life scores following an increase in their activity level. This shows that it is never too late to benefit from keeping active!
Please find below a link to the Parkinson’s Exercise framework which is a really useful guide to the types of activity that are suitable at various stages of the disease.
Thank you for reading,
Paul