CHICAGO — A brief exercise program reduced agitated behavior in a pilot study of 50 nursing home residents with severe cognitive impairment.
Other studies have already shown that exercise programs can reduce agitation and depression, and improve the ability to perform activities of daily living.
The current study involved 30 minutes of supervised exercise for 3 days per week for 3 weeks. Residents of locked special needs units at two nursing homes walked outdoors for 15 minutes in large groups and did 5 minutes each of weight lifting, sitting and standing, and throwing a beach ball in small groups.
At baseline, the mean St. Louis Mental Status Examination score among the 50 residents was 1.45 on a 30-point scale, with a score of 30 indicating full cognitive faculty.
Mean Pittsburgh Agitation Scale (PAS) scores improved significantly from 5.8 at baseline to 4.5 post-intervention on a 16-point scale, with 0 meaning no agitation, Edris Aman reported at the annual meeting of the American Geriatrics Society.
Those categorized with the highest PAS scores at baseline had the largest reductions in PAS scores falling from a mean score of 9.1 to 6.1.
“When you have a structured exercise program it seems like it kind of changes the way they think, especially when they interact one-on-one” said Mr. Aman, a medical student at St. Louis University School of Medicine in Missouri.
Continuous activity programming, in which residents are engaged in meaningful activities like exercise or casual conversation whenever they are in the main activity area, has been shown to reduce the number of days with agitation and psychoactive medication use and improve sleep in two dementia special care units (J. Am. Med. Dir. Assoc. 2006 Sep;7:426–31).
Mr. Aman said that anecdotally nurses reported that after a week of exercising patients who were previously up all night began sleeping through the night and remaining awake during the day.
Mr. Aman reported no conflicts of interest. The study was funded by a grant from the American Foundation for Aging Research.