In-home standing desk improved motor skills, quality of life in adults with Parkinson’s

Key takeaways:

• Patients assigned to use a standing desk with weekly exercise or exercise alone for 4 months after physical therapy.
• At 16 weeks, users improved motor function, muscle strength, balance and quality of life.

CHICAGO — Use of an in-home therapy desk improved motor skills and balance and reduced sedentarism in adults with Parkinson’s disease, according to data at the International Association of Parkinsonism and Related Disorders World Congress.

“There is a clear and large unmet medical need when people with Parkinson’s are done with their physical therapy, they don’t maintain the gains they make,” Miriam van Emde Boas, PT, DPT, research lab specialist in the department of radiology at Michigan Medicine, told Healio. “We found another way for people to maintain their needs by placing a device in their home.”

Van Emde Boas and colleagues sought to address a therapeutic gap in PD care by conducting a 4-month randomized, single-blinded feasibility study of an in-home, dynamic standing desk to promote low-intensity movement following a standard course of physical therapy.

From an initial cohort of 24 individuals, 19 were cleared for the study. Participants underwent 12 sessions of PT followed by 1:1 randomization, with nine individuals assigned to the standing desk along with usual weekly exercise and 10 controls assigned to weekly exercise alone. Researchers assessed participants before and after the PT sessions and again at 16 weeks.

According to results, 14 individuals completed the clinical trial, with those assigned to the therapy desk using it for an average of 2.2 hours per day at least 5 days a week.

While all participants experienced improvements after the initial 12 PT sessions, those in the standing desk group maintained gains made during those sessions and also sustained improvements at 16 weeks in hip abductor strength, lumbar bone mineral density, lean muscle mass and motor experiences, as measured by MDS-UPDRS part II.

In addition, participants reported improvements in balance confidence and quality of life, assessed via PDQ-39, as well as decreased fear of falling while using the apparatus and sitting time per week. Researchers reported no significant side effects of unsupervised use of the desk in the study group, and no participants fell or were injured during its use.

“People had less of a fear of falling, a better quality of life than those who did not use this device,” van Emde Boas said. “Their muscle mass increased, their bone density increased. We are working on decreasing sedentarism rather than increasing exercise — that is a different approach.”