Pushing the Limit: Impact of Exercise Intensity on Clinical Outcomes in Individuals with Parkinson’s Disease.

Research Objectives: To investigate the effectiveness of a 6-week intensity driven walking program on clinical based outcomes in individuals with PD.

Design: Single subject withdrawal design (A-B-A-B)

Setting: University of Evansville Physical Therapy research laboratory

Participants: Five individuals with PD living in the community.

Interventions: Walking intervention phases incorporated a 30-minute individualized intensity driven treadmill walking program practiced at 65% or more of one’s predetermined maximum heart rate, monitored by Polar H10 Heart Rate Sensors. Increased treadmill speed, incline, and resistance were manipulated to reach the target heart rate zone. Across all phases, four 60-minute sessions per week for 6 weeks were completed including a total of 16 intensity-based treadmill sessions per individual.

Main Outcome Measures: Primary: 6-minute walk test.
Secondary: 10MWT, 5xSTS, FGA, cardiovascular metrics of intensity, Parkinson’s disease questionnaire-39

Results: : 6-minute walk test within condition visual analysis demonstrated a therapeutic change during intervention phases and a countertherapeutic change during withdraw periods for all 5 individuals. An abrupt therapeutic effect was demonstrated for all individuals between conditions with the percent of nonoverlapping data ranging from 70-90%. Band method analysis revealed a range of 9-19 sessions two standard deviations above baseline mean performances for all individuals. Minimal clinically important differences were reached for the 6-minute walk test, 10-meter walk test and the PDQ-39 for all individuals.

Conclusions: These findings support the implementation of intensity driven gait to improve endurance and other gait performance measures for individuals with PD. Future research is needed to replicate these findings and generalize to a larger population.

Author(s) Disclosures: no disclosures