Home therapy feasible in a pilot trial of frail Parkinson's patients
In a pilot trial of 15 patients, the home physiotherapy group completed 100% of scheduled sessions with no adverse events, while controls maintained usual activities.
Blinded, registered NCT05388526
Limit: Only 9 patients were in the intervention group out of 15 recruited
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
An exploratory pilot randomized trial evaluated 15 men and women with Parkinson's disease and cognitive impairment—problems with thinking and memory—who were frail or prefrail. Their mean age was 76.3 years, and 53.3% were women.
Nine participants were assigned to a supervised home program of 16 individual 50-minute physiotherapy sessions over eight weeks, while six control participants maintained usual activities. The intervention group achieved a 100% session completion rate, and no adverse events, falls, or treatment complications were recorded. Two deaths occurred in the control group, unrelated to the study. Exploratory analyses suggested potential benefits in frailty, functional performance, disease severity, and quality of life, but frailty returned to levels similar to baseline at the three-month follow-up.
Why it matters
Frailty and cognitive difficulties are common in Parkinson's disease. The authors called for tailored, prolonged programs with continued follow-up to address functional difficulties as the disease progresses.
Caveats
The findings come from a small pilot trial of only 15 participants that had baseline differences between groups and saw frailty improvements fade after therapy ended. The results do not cover patients with dementia, acute illness causing clinical instability, or Parkinson's disease at stages 4 and 5, who were excluded.
From the paper
- Participants
The final sample consisted of 15 patients, 9 in the IG and 6 in the CG.
- Who took part
The inclusion criteria were as follows: men and women with PD, with no age limit, with stages 1–3 according to the Hoehn & Yahr scale (H&Y), presenting frailty or prefrailty according to the Fried scale, a score of more than 24 points in the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), having been referred to the Rehabilitation Service of the Instituto de Rehabilitación Astur between January 1 and July 31, 2022, and providing signed consent …
- Ages
The mean age was 76.3 ± 6.5 years, with the most represented age group being 70–79 years (46.7%).
- Sex
A slight predominance of women (53.3%) over men (46.7%) was observed.
- Harms
Regarding safety, no adverse events were recorded, and no falls or complications of any kind occurred following the physiotherapy intervention.
- Limitation
The initially calculated sample size exceeded the number of patients that could be recruited to carry out this study.
- Frailty
Additionally, an intervention effect was observed (Coef = −0.3, p = 0.021).
- Frailty
However, no intervention effect was observed (Coef = −0.37, p = 0.131), nor between the follow-up assessment and the baseline evaluation.
- Functional performance
Preliminary results suggested a potential improvement in the IG compared with the CG in the BI, SPPB, the MDS-UPDRS II subscale, and the PDQ-39, indicating a possible improvement in activities of daily living performance, physical performance, and quality of life in the IG.
- Disease severity
In addition, a trend toward improvement in activities of daily living, gait speed, disease severity, and quality of life was observed in the IG compared with the CG.
Quoted word for word from the full text on link.springer.com.
The paper
Universidad de Oviedo; Servicio Gallego de Salud
GeroScience, Jun 13, 2026, Open access
