Social theatre, Emotions and Parkinson’s disease: results from the second pilot study

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Giovanni Mirabella

Department of Physiology and Pharmacology,Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

: J Spine Neurosurg

Abstract

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Whether art therapy can be a useful rehabilitative tool is a long standing and debated question. To this aim, we run a randomized, controlled and single-blinded study lasted 3 years, on 20 subjects affected by a moderate form of idiopathic Parkinson’s disease (PD), in stable treatment with L-dopa and L-dopa agonists, and without severe sensory deficits (Modugno et al 2010). Half of them were randomly assigned to a “rehabilitative theatre” program, while the other half underwent conventional physiotherapy. Patients of both groups were evaluated at the beginning of each year, using five clinical rating scales. We found that, by the end of the third year, theatre-patients showed greater improvements of motor and non-motor symptoms than those of the control group. Despite the positive results, the study had a number of weakness. Data were collected only on subjective scales, and the benefits appeared only after a long period of time. To overcome these limitations, we run a new project, with 24 PD patients with the same experimental design of the previous one, but i) collecting outputs not only on clinical scales, but also using neuropsychological and psychophysical tests; ii) using a new form of theatre where patients have to undergo to an ‘emotional’ training. We found that the ‘emotional’ theatre was extremely effective and allowed to improve mental well-being of patients in only one year’s time. Thus, we replicated and extended our previous results showing that theatre, coupled with conventional medical treatments, represents a valid complementary therapeutic interventions for PD treatment.

Biography

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