The efficiency of aerobic exercise on neuropsychological functions in Alzheimer’s patients

Alzheimer's is one of the most prevalent neurodegenerative and progressive disorders in which is followed by cognitive impairment. This research was performed to study the effect of aerobic exercise on the Alzheimer’s patients’ neuropsychological functions. In a quasi-experimental study with the control group, fourteen Alzheimer’s patients of Alzheimer’s Association were selected by the convenience sampling. Before the intervention, the severity of their disease was assessed by FAST (Mohammadian, et al, 2015) and MMSE (Saidyan, et al, 2007) and the degree of hippocampal atrophy was recorded by brain MRI. They were randomly assigned into two groups of seven.  Both groups were assessed by MOCA (Sigaroodi, et al, 2012) and MMSE in the pretest and posttest stages. The experimental group participated in a 3-month physical exercise program using a stationary bicycle. This program was run twice a week and each session was 45 minutes. The control group did not receive any intervention. The results of the analysis of covariance showed that the neuropsychological function scores in the posttest of the Alzheimer’s patients in the experimental group were significantly higher than that of the control group.