Working as a travel physical therapy professional, you're going to come across a number of different health conditions. In many instances, you will provide rehabilitation to patients who have suffered an injury or undergone some type of operation. However, a new study shows that cardio exercise may ward off epilepsy.
What is epilepsy?
Depending on your past experience on travel therapy jobs, you may not have come into contact with epilepsy previously. This disorder causes patients to have seizures that are not triggered by a specific cause. In some instances, those who suffer from epilepsy have a family history of the disorder, and sometimes it can be the cause of a past brain injury. But more often than not, healthcare professionals are unable to associate the seizures to any specific reason – like a heart problems or extremely low blood sugar.
How can exercise help?
Researchers from the Center for Brain Repair and Rehabilitation conducted a population-based cohort study of Swedish males to uncover any relationship between cardiovascular fitness and a future risk of epilepsy. The analysis focused on exercise at the age of 18 for 1.17 million men who were born between 1950 and 1987. Follow-up was conducted 40 years later.
In order to calculate the risk of epilepsy upon follow-up, the investigators used the Cox proportional hazard model. At this time, 6,796 of the participants had been diagnosed with the seizure disorder. The individuals who had high fitness levels at the age of 18 were 80 percent and 35 percent less likely to develop epilepsy than the men with low and moderate levels, respectively.
"People who are very fit at the age of 18 have been training the body over the years to reach that level of fitness," Dr. Elinor Ben-Menachem, a researcher on the study, told LiveScience. "So these are children who've been active during the growth of their brain, when all of the synapses are being laid down, and the new connections are made."
Why cardiovascular exercise?
For this investigation, researchers specifically looked at cardiovascular activity among the participants. But, that's not to say that other methods of rehabilitation you may use in travel PT won't also be effective. Fitness in general plays an important role in advancing neurological functions when the brain is developing. So, other forms of exercise may also have the same results – it just so happens that cardio was the focus of this study.