Keeping people with Parkinson’s moving
According to the NHS around 1 in 500 people are affected by Parkinson’s disease. There is currently no cure, but drugs and other interventions can help reduce the main symptoms and maintain quality of life.
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder caused by a loss of nerve cells in a specific area of the brain called substantia nigra. It is unclear exactly what causes this loss of nerve cells, but it leads to a reduction in a chemical called dopamine in the brain. Dopamine plays a vital role in controlling your body’s movements and this reduction is responsible for many of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
One of the most debilitating symptoms is called freezing of gait – a feeling that your feet are stuck to the ground. Up to half of people with Parkinson’s will experience freezing of gait and the impact of it can be severe.
Dr Will Young, Senior Lecturer in Rehabilitation Psychology at the University of Exeter, is leading a research programme designed to help people with Parkinson’s get moving again. He says: “Freezing of gait is one of the most debilitating motor symptoms associated with Parkinson’s. It often looks like the person affected isn’t trying to take a step, which can result in other people getting impatient in queues, or busy places. Freezing is anxiety-inducing, and unfortunately that actually worsens the problem. It gets to the point where people don’t want to go out and ends up reducing their ability to live their lives as they want to.” Fear of falling can add to overall anxiety and make people even less inclined to venture out.
Freezing of gait also makes it more likely people will fall over as they try to force their feet to move, or when freezing happens suddenly and there is still momentum from a previous step.
The ultimate aim is to develop training that anyone can access freely.
Will and the project team (including researchers and an advisory group of people who experience freezing, their family members and also Parkinson’s specialist clinicians) have been developing a training programme in partnership with Parkinson’s UK to help people overcome freezing, and while testing is not yet complete he has so far seen a substantial improvement in participants’ ability to step from a freeze.
He says: “Most of us move without really thinking about it but there are different elements to taking a step and people with Parkinson’s will sometimes find their brain misses one of these elements or become fixated on one element in particular. This can ultimately make moving more difficult.
“What we do is create an activity in a part of the brain not impacted by Parkinson’s that allows people to pause, reset and then move on. We now know of a number of techniques that show promise in reducing freezing of gait and we’re currently running some trials using Virtual Reality. This means we can recreate any environment and make sure that situations are safe for people taking part.”
The research has been taking place in the University of Exeter’s VSimulators facility, with participants wearing a virtual reality headset and a body suit with sensors at key points. They navigate their way around a platform that can detect changed in motion, track freezes and also monitor any changes that occur following training to step from a freeze. This helps to determine which interventions will be most helpful in different scenarios.
The ultimate aim is to develop training that anyone can access freely to help both people with Parkinson’s and those around them who provide support. It will be available via Parkinson’s UK and the University of Exeter in the coming year.
