SAN DIEGO – As , researchers have developed a mobile app to encourage young patients with the disease to become more active. The smartphone-based app provides tailored physical activity information, coaching advice, and tools to increase social connectedness.
A pilot study examining whether the intervention changes activity, depression, and fatigue levels should be wrapped up later this year, but it looks as though the app is succeeding.
“The feedback we’ve gotten so far from our coaches is that the kids seem highly motivated,” said one of the creators, E. Ann Yeh, MD, professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of Toronto and director of the pediatric MS and neuroinflammatory disorders program at the Hospital for Sick Children.
Preliminary work showed that use of the app was associated with a 31% increase in physical activity.
They discussed this and other studies of the role of exercise in MS at the annual meeting of the Americas Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis.
Higher levels of depression and fatigue
Studies show that youths with MS who are less physically active are more likely to experience higher levels of fatigue and depression. Evidence suggests just 15-30 more minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) makes a clinical difference in terms of improved depression and fatigue scores, said Dr. Yeh.
With moderate physical activity (for example, a brisk walk or raking the yard), the maximal heart rate (HRmax) reaches 64%-76%, while with vigorous physical activity (which includes jogging/running or participating in a strenuous fitness class), the HRmax reaches 77%-93%.
Dr. Yeh described vigorous physical activity as “the stuff that makes you sweat, makes your heart rate go up, and makes you not be able to talk when you’re moving.”
As it stands, kids get very little MVPA – 9.5 min/day, which is well below the recommended 60 min/day. Adults do a bit better – 18.7 min/day of MVPA – but this is still below the recommended 30 min/day.
Being physically active improves fatigue for adults as well as kids, said Dr. Yeh. She referred to a network meta-analysis of 27 studies involving 1,470 participants that evaluated 10 types of exercise interventions, including yoga, resistance training, dance, and aquatic activities. It found that exercise “does move the needle,” she said. “Regardless of the kind of activity that was studied, fatigue seemed to improve.”
The authors of that study ranked aquatic exercise as the most effective intervention. “It’s possible that aquatics worked better because people who can’t move well feel more comfortable in the water,” Dr. Yeh said.
But she cautioned that the one study in the meta-analysis that found a “quite strong” effect of aquatic exercise was “very small.”
With regard to depression, which affects about 30% of people with MS, Dr. Yeh told meeting attendees, “unfortunately, the data are less clear” when it comes to physical activity for adults. One meta-analysis of 15 randomized controlled trials involving 331 exercising participants and 260 control persons found that only a few studies showed positive effects of exercise on depressive symptoms.
However, Dr. Yeh noted that in this review, the baseline depressive symptoms of participants were “above the cutoff level,” which makes it more difficult to demonstrate change in depression levels.