運動訓練對巴金森氏病個案注意力及工作記憶之改善成效－前趨研究

Different degrees of cognitive impairment occur in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), no matter in the early or late stage, especially those receiving long-term levodopa treatment. Prior studies have demonstrated that exercise training could effectively improve the gait function in patients with PD. However, researches concerning the effect of exercise training on improving the cognition function in PD patients are few. Hence, the purpose of this study was to test the effect of a 12-week exercise training program on cognition function in patients with PD. One-group pretest-posttest design with purposive sampling method was used in this study, and twenty PD patients who met the selection criteria were recruited. Criteria were patients who (1) had been diagnosed with idiopathic PD at least two items in three cardinal symptoms (resting tremor, bradykinesia and rigidity); (2) had taken levodopa stably at least for 3 months, as the disease condition has become stable and would not appear the unexpected ”on-off” phenomenon fluctuation; (3) disease severity was between Hoehn &Yahr stage I and II, as they had no balanced difficulty and could walk independently on treadmill machine; (4) had no frank dementia (clinical dementia rating scale≦0.5) to complete both attention and working memory tests independently. The Test Battery for Attention Performance (TAP; version 2.0) was applied for the assessment of attention and working memory. SPSS 17.0 for Windows was used for statistical analysis. Comparisons of the improvement between baseline and after exercise training were evaluated by Wilcoxon signed ranks test within group. The results revealed that through the 12-week exercise training program, the average reaction time from single stimulus of visual decreased significantly (z=-2.415, p=0.016). In addition, average accurate response rates from single auditory stimulus (z=-2.351, p=0.019) and from the double auditory stimuli (z=-2.654, p=0.008) increase significantly. Although the trend of improvement on working memory was demonstrated, there was no statistically significant difference. These findings partly support that exercise training improves the attention performance among PD patients.