BJMB! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Special Issue:
!!!!!! Brazilian!Journal!of!Motor!Behavior! !!!!!!!!!!!!COVID-19 (coronavirus disease): Impacts on motor behavior
!
https://doi.org/10.20338/bjmb.v15i1.236
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/brazil/). To control the rate of
transmission and avoid healthy system breakdown, local governments, including the
Brazilian government, declared full/partial lockdowns or restricted people circulation,
allowing only essential activities. These restrictions increase the time spending at home
working, watching TV, or only sitting, and one consequence was the reduction of the
amount of exercise.
1,2
This reduction of time expending doing exercise results in an
increase in mortality during pandemic lockdown.
3
Thereby, an exercise routine may be a
good strategy to prevent neurological
2
and cardiovascular
4
disease progression and
should be encouraged during home confinement.
Regular practices of physical activity delay Parkinson’s disease (PD) progression.
5
It is well-established that higher levels of physical activity improve PD-related symptoms.
6
On the other hand, lower level of physical activity increases motor (e.g., rigidity, tremor,
akinesia, bradykinesia, unbalance, freezing of gait) and non-motor (e.g., depression,
anxiety, sleep disturbance, fatigue) symptoms.
7
Thus, keeping physically active can be a
good strategy to avoid the negative effects of routine changes due to the COVID-19
pandemic in people with PD. Social distancing and home confinement hindered access to
healthcare professionals, requiring alternative strategies such as home-based remotely
exercise. A bunch of groups have promoted live (synchronous class) or recorded exercise
(asynchronous class) classes during pandemic lockdown to promote exercise among the
population, including people with PD. The synchronous class has full-time interaction
between the healthcare professional and the individual, with controlled intensity prescribed
and with real-time feedback and patient's movement correction.
8,9
Although the
asynchronous class allows the participant to perform the activity at any time of the day, it is
limited or not present any kind of interaction with the class professor during the
performance of class.
9,10
This limited interaction with the patients could influence in some
of training parameters such as the effort of the session. For instance, in longitudinal terms
asynchronous exercise present lower training load values than synchronous exercise,
11
which could affect some workload outcomes-dependents.
Considering that i) pandemic COVID-19 increased the time at home without
exercise, ii) the lack of exercise worse motor and non-motor symptoms in people with PD,
and iii) remotely strategies are the unique safe exercise to avoid COVID-19 infection, we
investigated as synchronous and asynchronous remotely exercise during pandemic
COVID-19 affected the motor and non-motor symptoms, physical activity level, anxiety,
depression, sleep quality, and quality of life during home confinement in people with PD in
the first three months of COVID-19 pandemic (March to June of 2020). We expected that
both groups that performing remotely exercise present lower motor and non-motor
symptoms than the no-exercise group. Besides, the group performing synchronous
exercise would present lower manifestations of motor and non-motor symptoms and a
higher amount of physical activity performed than the asynchronous exercise group. For
the last, we expected that higher levels of physical activity, independent of the group, will
be related with lower PD-related symptoms.
METHODS
Participants
Individuals with PD were invited by social media (Facebook
®
, Instagram
®
), e-mail,