Introduction: Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is classified as a movement disorder exhibiting symptoms of slowness of movement, rigidity, and the characteristic tremor that is caused by the destruction of nerves within an area of the brain associated with fine movement. James Parkinson, the name who first described the disease, noticed that sufferers also experienced feelings of breathlessness and despite thousands of papers being written on PD since then few studies have examined this link. The CLEAR Unit of Oxford Brookes performed an incremental cycling exercise test on 83 people with Parkinsons’s (pwP) collecting breath by breath data. Results: Data was analysed for 82 pwP (47 males); age range 1936/1997. The Anaerobic Threshold (AT) was 73% of peak oxygen consumption. The ratio of RPEB/RPEL (RPE=Rating of perceived exertion(B=breathing/L=legs)) was 6.9/5.96 on a 10-point scale. Conclusion: A normal AT would be above 40%, but the elevated result in this cohort may be due to a lower peak oxygen consumption (VO2 (peak)) in these patients (1.56±0.6). The RPEB/RPEL ratio may reflect an abnormally high peak breathing effort but normative data is currently lacking. The ratio matched closely with that of professional soccer players, who are performing much more work for the same level of breathing effort. Research has shown that exercise can help improve the symptoms of PD, and this data has begun to show that breathing is a limiting factor of performing exercise in pwP. Identifying this may lead future research into alleviating these symptoms and therefore potentially improving their quality of life.
Permanent link to this resource: https://doi.org/10.24384/000527
Underwood, Daniel
Faculty of Health and Life Sciences\Department of Biological and Medical Sciences
Year: 2018
© The Author(s) Published by Oxford Brookes University