Impact of Exercise on "Invisible" Symptoms and Quality of Life in Multiple Sclerosis Individuals

Summary

Patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) struggle on a daily basis with accompanying, "Invisible" symptoms like primary fatigue, pain and emotional-cognitive disorders. With the disease progression, these symptoms only intensify, and in combination with basic physical symptoms, quality of life (QOL) rapidly decreases.

An important goal of researchers and clinicians involves improving the QOL of individuals with MS, and the exercise therapy represents potentially modifiable behavior that positively impacts on pathogenesis of MS and these "Invisible" symptoms, thus improving the QOL.

However, the main barrier for its application is low motivational level that MS patients experience due to fatigue with adjacent reduced exercise tolerability and mobility, and muscle weakness. Getting individuals with MS motivated to engage in continuous physical activity may be particularly difficult and challenging, especially those with severe disability or Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS 6-8).

Till now, researchers have focused their attention mainly on the moderate or vigorous intensity of exercise and on cardiorespiratory training in MS patients to achieve improvements in daily life quality, less indicating the exercise content, and most importantly, breathing exercises.

In addition, it is investigators intention to make exercise for MS patients more applicable and accessible, motivational and easier, but most important, productive.

Investigators think that MS patients experience more stress with aerobic exercise or moderate to high intensity program exercise, and can hardly keep continuum including endurance exercise, or treadmill.

Hypothesis:

Investigators hypothesis is that 8-weeks of continuous low demanding or mild exercise program with the accent on breathing exercise can attenuate primary fatigue, pain, headaches, emotional-cognitive and sleep dysfunctions in MS patients and provide maintenance of exercise motivation. Investigators also propose that important assistant factor for final goal achievement is social and mental support of the exercise group (EDSS from 0-8) led by a physiotherapist. This will help to maintain exercise motivation and finally make better psychophysical functioning, and thus better QOL.

Conditions

• Multiple Sclerosis
• Quality of Life
• Motivation
• Pain
• Headache
• Migraine
• Anxiety Disorders
• Depressive Disorder
• Sleep Disorder
• Insomnia
• Physical Disability
• Fatigue

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Exercise training

Exercise program includes breathing and upper and lower limbs exercise.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Rijeka

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Tanja Grubić Kezele, PhD, MD · University of Rijeka

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

PREVENTION

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Max Age

80 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2018-10-01

Primary Completion

2019-02-05

Completion

2019-02-05

Countries

• Croatia

Study Locations