According to the Parkinson’s Foundation, an estimated 10 million people around the world live with Parkinson’s disease, a neurological condition that negatively impacts the body’s central nervous system, which greatly effects a person’s physical strength and movement.
“The brain is a dynamic and ever-evolving system, and Parkinson’s disease disrupts this system in complex, continually changing ways,” Aasef Shaikh MD, PhD, professor and vice chair (research), director of the Research and Education Center in the Neurological Institute at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center, Department of Neurology at UH Cleveland Medical Center, explained to Medical News Today.
“Even in the absence of disease, the brain undergoes natural changes as it ages. When a degenerative condition like Parkinson’s is introduced, it adds layers of complexity and nonlinear disruptions to brain function,” he said.
For this study, researchers recruited nine adult participants with Parkinson’s disease to undergo 12 cycling sessions over a four-week period. All participants had deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices that had already been implanted before the start of the study.
“This study … leveraged DBS for its unique ability to record neural activity in the brain regions surrounding the stimulation lead,” Shaikh said. “Using this capability, the researchers examined how exercise influences and potentially rewires brain function.”
Scientists utilized an adaptive cycling program where over time, the bike “learned” how each participant performed while biking. For example, while a game screen allowed participants to know their pedaling intensity, the bike would add or remove resistance depending on each rider’s effort level.
Measurable changes after 12 cycling sessions
At the study’s conclusion, Shaikh and his team found that after 12 cycling sessions, study participants demonstrated a measurable change in the brain signals involved with both motor control and movement.
“This finding provided proof of principle that exercise changes the brain. It further informed us that change only happens when exercise is done persistently, consistently, and over (a) long period of time. From the mechanistic standpoint it told us that drivers of such change may reside outside of basal ganglia, the key structure involved in Parkinson’s disease,” said Shaikh.
“(The) main takeaway from the patients’ perspective is that one has to keep (an) active lifestyle, constantly doing physical ‘exercise’ to keep up with Parkinson’s disease,” Shaikh explained. “Analogous to this is doing ‘mental exercise’ — which will help one stay mentally healthy and cognitively healthy. The take away from scientific and mechanistic standpoint is that exercise induced change (plasticity) happens, but the driver is outside of the basal ganglia. We have yet to determine that driver, but it could very well be (the) proprioceptive system and/or the cerebellum.”
“We would like to broaden this mechanistic investigation with more imaging and structure to function correlation tool sets available to us,” Shaikh added. “We would also like to expand the effort, disseminating bike technology in multicenter trials. We would like to explore whether other exercise modalities have similar benefits.”
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