Researchers studying Parkinson’s disease are spending more time on what the effects of exercise is having on fighting back against the disease. It is becoming clear that working out does reduce symptoms, but it appears it has to be strenuous. The below article by Alice Reid of the Washington Post confirms much of the same that has been repeatedly stated here at Attitude Fitness Wins on numerous posts including our first post ever on September 22, 2011, My Story.

Well before sunup, Chuck Linderman launches his daily workout at the Alexandria, Va., boat house: 30 minutes pulling hard on a Concept 2 rowing machine, an equal stint lifting free weights and 30 minutes pedaling a stationary bike. He drives himself to sweaty, breathless exhaustion, for Linderman is training for the race of his life — a race against Parkinson’s disease.

Exercise of any sort has long been known to be helpful for Parkinson’s. Before the development of effective drug therapy in the ’60s, patients often improved with any exercise, even the act of folding laundry, according to Michael Okun, national medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation, which emphasizes exercise as an important tool to fight the disease.

Much of Linderman’s regimen — daily cycling and hard rowing, plus weight training twice a week with a personal trainer — is just the sort of workout that is intriguing researchers. There is evidence that challenging the muscles through repetitive resistance motion far beyond one’s comfort zone can diminish some symptoms.

Preliminary studies show that after eight weeks of cycling three times a week at a pace high enough to break a sweat and raise the heart rate, some patients can recoup much of their mobility for nearly four weeks. After that, gains disappear unless the patient resumes exercising. While it cannot cure Parkinson’s, heavy-duty exercise shows promise for countering, even delaying, the inability to move that the disease causes.

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research has funded close to $3 million in exercise research. And Okun of the Parkinson’s Foundation said the focus is on finding the most effective exercise. “We know you need to sweat,” says Okun. “But we don’t know exactly what kind of exercise is most effective, its optimum frequency or what the long-term benefits are.”

Jay L. Alberts, a Parkinson’s researcher at the Cleveland Clinic, discovered how good intense cycling could be quite by accident eight years ago, as he rode a tandem bike across Iowa with a friend who has the disease. The purpose of the trip was simply to show that with Parkinson’s you can live an active life,” says Alberts. But something surprising happened. Although the disease had already robbed his friend of her ability to write legibly, she could suddenly write her name clearly after the first day of strenuous cycling.

For five years Alberts has been researching the effects of strenuous cycling on patients. With $1.5 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has finished a 60-person study and has just launched another for 100 patients. Although no final answers are in, Alberts’ work has sparked interest in the Parkinson’s world. Indoor cycling programs have sprung up at YMCAs in Seattle, Cleveland and Sarasota, Fla., with another in the planning stages in Los Angeles. A nonprofit called Pedaling for Parkinson’s is affiliated with the YMCA.

For Alberts’ just-completed study, patients rode indoor bikes. First he tested them to determine the pace at which they were comfortable, which was about 60 pedal revolutions per minute. Then they were required to pedal 35 percent faster. After three-times-a-week sessions, nearly all patients showed improvement in mobility and small motor skills, and not one dropped out of the rigorous program. And although cycling involves the legs, mobility improved elsewhere as well — “in manipulation — the ability to open a jar, for instance. Something global was happening in the brain,” Alberts says. When Alberts did brain scans on his research subjects they showed that exercise sparked blood flow and brain activity as effectively as the medications routinely prescribed for Parkinson’s.

“One of our goals is, can we delay the onset of symptoms. This is a neurodegenerative disease,” Alberts says. “If we can alter the slope of that progression, there is tremendous value here. You want to make sure the person is really doing something. They must actively participate,” he says. By cycling intensely, Alberts speculated, “you have information about a (muscle) movement going back to the brain. So if you can increase the quality and the quantity of that information, it may trigger biochemical changes in the brain.”

Another researcher, University of Florida neuroscientist David E. Vaillancourt, has been comparing how patients do on two exercise programs, the Parkinson’s Foundation’s “Fitness Counts” and Progressive Resistance Exercise, which is directed at lifting increasingly heavy weights.
“My colleagues and I believe that pushing the patients to work out hard is the key to exercise training in Parkinson’s disease,” he says. Told of Linderman’s workouts, he added, “It sounds to me that Mr. Linderman has figured this out on his own.” Linderman, for his part, said fighting Parkinson’s with exercise has many benefits. “And,” he adds, “it beats taking a whole lot more pills.”