Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated the names of two organizations. They are the National Parkinson Foundation, not the Parkinson’s Foundation, and Pedaling for Parkinson’s, not Peddling for Parkinson’s. This version has been corrected.
(Matt McClain/ FOR THE WASHINGTON POST ) - Six years after receiving a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, Chuck Linderman does his daily exercise at a rowing facility in Alexandria.
“The purpose of the trip was simply to show that with Parkinson’s you can live an active life,” said Alberts.
But something surprising happened. Although the disease had already robbed his friend of her ability to write legibly, she could suddenly write her name clearly after the first day of strenuous cycling.
The following winter, Alberts rode with patients in Tucson and elsewhere, “and I heard the same kind of thing. I knew we needed to follow this up.”
For five years Alberts has been researching the effects of strenuous cycling on patients. With $1.5 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Veterans Affairs, he has finished a 60-person study and has just launched another for 100 patients. Although no final answers are in, Alberts’ work has sparked interest in the Parkinson’s world. Indoor cycling programs have sprung up at YMCAs in Seattle, Cleveland and Sarasota, Fla., with another in the planning stages in Los Angeles. A nonprofit called Pedaling for Parkinson’s is affiliated with the YMCA .
For Alberts’s just-completed study, patients rode indoor bikes. First he tested them to determine the pace at which they were comfortable, which was about 60 pedal revolutions per minute. Then they were required to pedal 35 percent faster.
After three-times-a-week sessions, nearly all patients showed improvement in mobility and small motor skills, and not one dropped out of the rigorous program. And although cycling involves the legs, mobility improved elsewhere as well — “in manipulation — the ability to open a jar, for instance. Something global was happening in the brain,” Alberts said.
When Alberts did brain scans on his research subjects they showed that exercise sparked blood flow and brain activity as effectively as the medications routinely prescribed for Parkinson’s.
“One of our goals is, can we delay the onset of symptoms. This is a neurodegenerative disease,” Alberts said. “If we can alter the slope of that progression, there is tremendous value here.”
Firing up the neurons
To discover exactly what is happening in the brain, Alberts, who is a kinesiologist and not a brain chemist, depends on others, including University of Pittsburgh Medical Center neurologist Michael J. Zigmond, who is studying how exercise affects the brain chemistry of animals that have a version of Parkinson’s.
Parkinson’s disease kills off the brain cells that produce dopamine, a chemical that enables the brain cells, or neurons, that control muscles to communicate with those muscles. The result can be the patient’s loss of small and large motor skills such as walking or writing, swinging a bat or tying one’s shoes.
Research has shown that when lab animals hop on treadmills or wheels, their brains produce increased blood flow and more synapses, or message paths, between brain cells. Their neurons fire with more energy.
Zigmond is testing a hypothesis that might explain what’s happening with Alberts’s patients and why Chuck Linderman is doing so well.
“One thing Parkinson’s does is it decreases the amount of compounds in the brain called neurotrophic factors,” Zigmond said in a recent interview. “Our hypothesis is that exercise increases neurotrophic factors, and they in turn protect the neurons that produce dopamine.”
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