Effectiveness of an Active Lifestyle Promotion Program for Patients With Parkinson's Disease

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are heavily inclined towards a sedentary lifestyle. This is caused by a combination of physical impairments and cognitive dysfunction. However, regular physical activity in PD is highly desirable, for two reasons. First, physical activity has positive generic effects in preventing complications such as cardiovascular diseases, type II diabetes mellitus, osteoporosis and certain cases of cancer. Secondly, physical activity has additional disease-specific merits in PD such as depression, sleep disturbances and constipation. These effects lead to raised quality of life. Furthermore, animal studies suggest that physical activity could slow down disease progression.

Simply informing patients about the importance of physical activity is not enough to initiate and maintain an adequate level of physical activity. We propose to develop a physical activity promoting program for sedentary patients with PD in order to raise their level of daily physical activity.

Objective: The first aim of the study is to investigate whether a physical activity promotion program will result in an increase in physical activity in sedentary patients with PD.

The second aim is to demonstrate an increase in physical fitness and quality of life.