Are you considering adding exercise to your daily routine or significantly increasing your level of activity? Talk to your doctor about the exercises and physical activities that are best for you. During your appointment, you can ask:

Are there any exercises or activities I should avoid?

Your doctor can make recommendations based on your health history, keeping in mind any recent surgeries or ongoing health conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, or heart disease. This would be a great time to check with your doctor about any unexplained symptoms you’ve been experiencing, such as chest pain or pressure, joint pain, dizziness, or shortness of breath. Your doctor may recommend postponing exercise until the problem is diagnosed and treated.

Is my preventive care up to date?

Your doctor can tell you if there are any tests you might need. For example, women over age 65 should be checked regularly for osteoporosis.

How does my health condition affect my ability to exercise?

Some health conditions can affect your exercise routine. For example, people with arthritis may need to avoid some types of activity, especially when joints are swollen or inflamed. Those with diabetes may need to adjust their daily schedule, meal plan, or medications when planning their activities. Your doctor can talk to you about any adjustments you need to make to ensure that you get the most out of your new exercise routine.

A community-based support group focusing on sharing relevant information and education about all things Parkinson’s.

Meetings are held monthly on the third Tuesday, 10-11am, at Crosspointe Church (5415 Ralston Ave.). Next meeting on Tuesday, Feb. 15.

Ventura County Parkinson’s Support Group gets together every month with skilled, experienced professionals who present significant breakthroughs, strategies and related issues surrounding Parkinson’s. The group’s mission is for participants to better understand and talk about how this information impacts their own lives and affects immediate family members. In addition to those diagnosed with PD, caregivers, family members and friends are all welcome to attend free of charge.

More than just a meeting, all discussions/presentations offer interactive, compassionate, relevant education on PD. Topics range from “How to get up off the floor when you’ve fallen,” to “Nutrition and Parkinson’s” to “The benefits of deep brain stimulation and assessing if you’re a good candidate for DBS.”

Jon Everhart, retired accountant, US Marine and regular group attendee said, “It’s nice comparing treatments, symptoms, and the challenges we all face living with Parkinson’s.” This caring group empowers people like Jon to be more proactive and to participate in deciding the direction of his treatment, complemented by his team of doctors’ suggestions.

This unique group gives everyone a great opportunity to learn more about current PD research, to gain more awareness about local help and resources, to share relevant experiences with others — and to have fun along the way.

The Ventura County Parkinson’s Support Group was recently resurrected (post-Covid) by Dr. Vanessa White, owner of Ventura County Neurofitness (a local fitness program designed specifically for those with Parkinson’s and other neurological degenerative diseases). The impetus for her assuming this responsibility was after her mother-in-law, Toy White, was diagnosed several years ago with PD. This important, special group was born upon her passing.

Repost from NIH Research Matters

Fewer than 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. get the amount of exercise recommended to maintain health and prevent chronic disease. Designing interventions that encourage people to exercise more regularly has proven challenging.

Researchers have tested many strategies to increase physical activity. But these studies tend to be small. Variation in populations, locations, and other factors also makes it hard to compare results. And what works in one setting may not work in another.

To overcome these limitations, researchers led by Drs. Katherine Milkman and Angela Duckworth from the University of Pennsylvania tested dozens of different ways to boost exercise using a novel approach they developed called a megastudy.

The research team included 30 scientists from 15 universities. They enrolled more than 60,000 members using a gym Members are required to check in electronically before using the gym. This allowed the researchers to track how often people exercised before, during, and after the study.

The researchers created 53 different 4-week programs designed to encourage exercise. All programs included planning when workouts would occur, text message reminders before planned workouts, and micro-rewards—points redeemable for small credits on Amazon. Additional strategies and incentives were then stacked on top of these three elements.

Because of the study’s size, each intervention could be tested in hundreds to thousands of people. The researchers compared the interventions against the baseline program for their ability to boost the number of gym visits during four weeks of intervention and for ten weeks afterward. An additional control group received no intervention except for an Amazon credit when they enrolled in the study equal to the expected earnings in most programs ($1.08).

The study was funded in part by NIH’s National Institute on Aging (NIA). Results were published on December 8, 2021, in Nature.

Overall, 45% of the interventions boosted the number of weekly gym visits during the four-week study period compared with the control group. These increased exercise from around 9% to 27%.

Five of the interventions stood out for being especially effective. One provided higher overall rewards for workouts. Two provided bonus rewards for returning to the gym after a missed workout. One let participants choose whether they wanted their rewards framed as losses or gains (that is, losing or earning reward points). And another sent text messages informing participants that most Americans exercise, and that this fraction is growing.

To explore the value of the megastudy approach, the researchers surveyed more than 300 experts in the field about which programs they thought would most effectively boost exercise. Those predictions did not match up with the interventions that resulted in the most gym visits.

“These results show how difficult it is to predict which interventions to increase exercise will work,” says Duckworth.

“They also highlight the value of megastudies,” Milkman adds, “which allow researchers to test many different approaches to changing behavior at once in order to determine what interventions are most effective.”

Negative results from small studies often get little to no attention. Megastudies have the additional advantage of being able to rule out, all at once, many interventions that don’t work. They’re now being used to test other public health interventions, such as encouraging vaccination.

—by Sharon Reynolds

This research is supported in part by NIA grants P30AG034546 and 5P30AG034532.