Research article

Effects of exercise therapy on Huntington’s Disease motor symptoms – A meta-analysis

Abstract

Background: Huntington’s disease is an incurable neurodegenerative disorder. In addition to drug therapy, attempts are being made to improve the symptoms of this disease with exercise therapy. This meta-analysis therefore investigates these effects on individual symptom areas. Methods: Search of the online databases PEDro, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus, keywords exercise OR exercise therapy OR physical therapy OR rehabilitation AND Huntington’s Disease, published between 1990 and 2024. The PEDro score is used to check the methodological quality, and standardized mean differences (SMD) and their 95% confidence intervals (CI) are presented in forest plots for quantitative analysis. Results: A total of 4833 publications were found. After excluding duplicates and studies that examined other topics, 12 studies remained, which were subjected to a qualitative analysis. Only seven studies achieved an average quality of at least five points, which were then examined quantitatively. SMD values between 4.34 and -3.03 were found, but almost all of them were favouring the control group. Discussion: The widely varying and sometimes inconclusive values could have been caused by sample sizes that were too small, different interventions, disease status, unequal groups at baseline, and active control groups. Conclusions: Therefore, more high-quality studies with clear intervention concepts and larger sample sizes are needed.