Objective. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of a long-period multimodal exercise program on balance, mobility and clinical status of patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Methods. Thirty-three PD patients were assigned into two groups: a training group ( ; aged years) and a control group ( ; aged years). The TG patients were enrolled in a 6-month multimodal exercise program. This program was designed to improve physical capacity components and to reduce PD impairments. Balance and mobility were assessed immediately before and after the training protocol using the Berg Balance Scale (BBS), the “Timed up and go” (TUG), and the Posture Locomotion Test (PLM). Also, clinical variables were assessed (disease stage and impairments). Results. The TG showed an improvement in the TUG ( ) while CG were not influenced by the 6-months period. Both groups showed no differences for BBS and PLM and for their disease impairments—assessed through the Unified Parkinson’s disease Scale. Conclusions. Long-term multimodal exercise programs are able to improve mobility of patients with Parkinson’s disease and therefore should be used on clinical day life. 1. Introduction Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second neurodegenerative disease in incidence in people over 60 years old [1]. PD patients present a series of non-motor and motor symptoms. However, the motor features, such as bradykinesia, tremor and rigidity are those which mostly decrease their quality of life [2]. As a consequence of these symptoms, PD patients present mobility impairments and lack of balance, which increase their risk of falls (70% of PD patients fall, at least once within a year [3]). To assess mobility and balance, three different tools had being widely used: the Berg Balance Scale (BBS [4–7]), the “Timed up and Go” test (TUG [8–10]) and the Posture-Locomotor-Manual Test (PLM [11]). The gold-standard treatment for PD is the pharmacological approach. However, some have shown that the use of such medicines does not fully improve mobility and balance [12]. Actually, the use of some medications for long periods could induce dyskinesia [13], increasing unbalance. Therefore, since exercise has shown to be very successful to improve patients’ quality of life, they should be considered [10, 14]. Many specific exercise programs have been suggested to reduce motor impairments of PD patients, such as walking exercises [15], resistance training [16], constrained-induced movement therapy [17], attention focused exercises [18], and others. The rationale of some of these programs is that patients do not
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