Exercise programme intervention for persons with motor ataxia

• Autor(a) principal: Honório, Samuel
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Batista, Marco, Serrano, João, Petrica, João, Mesquita, Helena, Carrão, Luis, Ribeiro, Jaime, Santos, Jorge, Martins, Júlio, Silva, Maria Raquel G.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.11/7085
• topic: Ataxia; Motor development; Health; Exercise programme

Introduction: Ataxia affects the nervous system by decreasing balance and coordination most mostly in the trunk, arms and legs. Physical activity is used to help lowering the symptoms of this disease. Objective: The study objective aims to determine the effects of an exercise program intervention focused on quality of life of this person in terms of body composition, hemodynamic parameters and functional capacity. Methods: A Longitudinal study-case with the exercise sessions performed in a gymnasium with a specialized Personal Trainer. A 43 years old male individual with motor ataxia as participated with a pre and post-test assessments with an exercise program comprised sessions twice a week of 30 minutes each, for 6 months, focused on cardio-fitness, strength and body stabilization. The Scale for the Assessment and Rating of Ataxia was applied to evaluate Gait, Stance, Sitting, Finger Chase, Nose-finger Test, Fast alternating hand movements and Heel-chin slide, and the program SPSS (v20) to present descriptive statistics to express the participant’s improvements. Results: This study indicates that rehabilitation can improve health, well-being and life quality improvements in individuals with ataxia, however, a larger study is required to have analyse if these variables would suffer significant changes in all participants. Besides the improvements in body composition and blood pressure, benefits in all variables of SARA scale were observed, except in «Sitting» were the value remained unchanged. Conclusions: This type of exercise programme intervention can promote capacity and health-related quality of life. This study provides evidence for maintaining physical activity programs in patients with ataxia.