The targeted rehabilitation program with corrective exercises on trainable mentally handicapped people with upper body disorders

Community-based rehabilitation is a multi-dimensional approach to improve the function and quality of life to mentally ill people.

This study examined the effect of rehabilitation protocol that were the spine strengthening exercises on adult mentally disabled men with upper body anomalies.

This study was performed on 28 educable mentally disabled with the age range of 30-45. These subjects had positional hyperkyphosis angle, more than 45° and FHP more than 46°. They were randomly divided into two groups of experimental (n=16) and control (n=12). Experimental group followed the three-step training protocol for two months. A spinal mouse and a digital camera were used to measure the deviation of thoracic area’s hyperkyphosis and the FHP angle respectively. The dependent and independent t-tests were applied for within and between groups’ comparisons respectively. The significance level was considered at 0.05, all analysis of study was done by SPSS23.

The mean of hyperkyphosis and FHP angles in experimental group, significantly decreased (P= 0.008, 0.003), respectively. But there was no significant change in control group (P= 0.101, 0.122). The independent t-test results for both variables indicated a significant difference between control and experimental subjects after the protocol (P= 0.001).

The combined corrective exercises caused a reduction in head, neck and trunk disorders of study subjects.