Women who participate in regular exercise such as cycling, walking, gardening, cleaning, and participating in sports may be less likely to develop the risk of having Parkinson’s disease a study suggests.
Women who exercised the most had a 25% lower rate of the condition when compared to those who exercised the least.
Additionally, the research highlighted that 10 years before diagnosis, levels of exercise fell at a faster rate in those with Parkinson’s than in those without, likely due to early symptoms of the disease.
Experts suggest the findings support exercise programmes that were created to help lower the risk of Parkinson’s.
“Exercise is a low-cost way to improve health overall, so our study sought to determine if it may be linked to a lower risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, a debilitating disease that has no cure,” Study author Alexis Elbaz, of the Inserm research centre in Paris, France, said.
“Our results provide evidence for planning interventions to prevent Parkinson’s disease,” she adds.
The study included 95,354 female participants, mainly teachers, with an average age of 49 who did not have Parkinson’s disease at the start of the study.
These women were followed for 30 years and during that time 1,074 of them developed Parkinson’s and over the course of the study they were asked to complete up to six questionnaires.
They were asked how far they walked and how many flights of stairs they climbed daily, how many hours they spent on household activities as well as how much time they spent doing moderate recreational activities such as gardening and more vigorous activities such as sports.
Researchers assigned each activity a score based on the metabolic equivalent of a task (METs) as a way to quantify energy expenditure.
For each activity, METs were multiplied by their frequency and duration in order to get a physical activity score of METs-hours per week.
A more intense form of exercise like cycling was six METs, while less intense exercise such as walking and cleaning was three METs, for example.
The average physical activity level for participants was 45 METs-hours per week at the start of the study.
Women in the study were divided into four equal groups of just over 24,000 people each. At the start of the study, those in the highest group had an average physical activity score of 71 METs-hours per week, while those in the lowest had an average score of 27.
In the group that did the most exercise, there were 246 cases of Parkinson’s disease, compared to 286 cases in the lowest exercise group.
Although factors such as place of residence, age of first period and menopausal status, and smoking played a part in the findings, researchers found those in the highest exercise group had a 25% lower rate of developing Parkinson’s disease than those in the lowest exercise group when physical activity was assessed up to 10 years before diagnosis.
They found this association remained when physical activity was assessed up to 15 or 20 years before diagnosis. The results were similar after adjusting for diet or medical conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, researchers found.