Tai Chi and ballet ease symptoms of MS

Multiple Sclerosis is (MS) one of those confusing disease labels.

The cause is difficult to find and the pathology or how the disease affects a person, varies from person to person. But MS is debilitating and life with it is a struggle of symptoms, including difficulties with coordination, motor skills and balance, among many others.

Where quality of life is concerned, being able to regain balance, to coordinate the body, to regain agility and thus return to doing activities you love, is huge. Today, I’d like to focus on two studies showing links to specific physical activities that help restore balance and coordination to those suffering MS.

MS thinks the body is the enemy

Before discussing the studies let’s briefly review the mechanism and symptoms of MS, which affects two-to-three times more women than men, between ages 20 and 50. The National MS Society describes MS as “an unpredictable, often disabling disease of the central nervous system that disrupts the flow of information within the brain, and between the brain and body.”

There’s more to it, though, in terms of how this “disruption” happens. Basically, MS is an auto-immune disease, which means the immune system reacts abnormally and attacks itself, unable to distinguish it from a virus. The result is a demyelination of the spinal cord, which is damage to the protective covering (the myelin sheath) around the nerve fibers.

Think of the rubber coating around the wires of a power chord. If that coating we removed in an area, the electric current would not move as expected. In MS this loss of this protective coating causes nerve impulses to slow, misfire or stop resulting in loss of motor skills, coordination and balance, and causing impaired vision and pain.

Let’s review two studies that focus on specific physical activities that improve balance, coordination and agility in people with MS. The recent 2016 study looks at ballet in very specific ways. Yet, after reading the ballet study I immediately thought of Tai Chi as another potential therapy, and found a study on it. So I want to introduce this study first.

Tai Chi and MS

A study looking at the beneficial effects of Tai Chi on balance, coordination, fatigue and depression was published in a 2014 edition of BioMed Central’s BMC Neurology. The study looked to see how a combination of exercise and mindfulness practice (i.e., Tai Chi) could affect MS patients. Because of the slow-moving and low-impact nature of Tai Chi, it was seen by researchers as potentially a perfect exercise for MS patients, or anyone with impaired motor skills and balance issues.

For the study, 32 MS patients were divided into two groups: a treatment as usual (TAU) group and a Tai Chi group. The Tai Chi engaged in a structured Tai Chi course of 90 minutes per session, two sessions per week, for six months. Both groups were examined and accessed before and after the six month period in terms of balance, coordination, fatigue, depression and life satisfaction.

The results were strong and promising. The Tai Chi groups showed “significant, consistent improvements in balance, coordination, and depression, relative to the TAU group… life satisfaction improved.” The researchers concluded that “Tai Chi holds therapeutic potential for MS patients,” and that “further research is needed to determine underlying working mechanisms.”

Well, that “further research” has just been discovered in the second study I want to introduce here.

Ballet and MS

The results of a recent pilot study showing that ballet improves ataxia (coordination) in MS patients was presented at the conference Neuroscience 2016, by University of Illinois researcher Citlali Lopez-Ortiz, PhD and colleagues. Their presentation, “Ataxia rehabilitation in multiple sclerosis through a targeted dance class,” focused specifically on the effects classic ballet training has on MS patients.

According to the researchers, “There is no documented evidence for improving smooth coordination of movements through exercise interventions among those with MS.” This is where, above, I mention my initial thought of Tai Chi being a perfect exercise for MS. For the ballet pilot study five participants with MS engaged in twice weekly structured classical ballet classes for 16 weeks. There was a two week pause at the mid-way point wherein participants were again assessed.

“Animal models have shown that exercise increases myelination,” Lopez-Ortiz told MedPage Today. “We think this sort of more heavily loaded, whole body exercise might be pushing some of the mechanisms that are improving conduction in MS so that we see improved coordination and reduction in ataxia.”

With this in mind, ballet was their chosen form of whole-body movement, with specific focus on movements that might improve balance, coordination, motor skills and agility. They also considered that the pairing of music with the ballet was important to look at. According to Lopez-Ortiz, “Dance couples music and movement intrinsically. Also, classical ballet has a high cognitive demand, involving the entire body all the time. Of all possible forms of dance, it is the most demanding, but it creates the most dexterous people on the planet.”

Although the study was small, participants showed significant improvements on “all measures at all locations, including the upper arm, elbow, upper leg, and knee… [with] improvement of 42% in balance and walking ability combined.”

Conclusion

This study and others show that exercise really is and should be a first-line treatment for pain syndromes. Moreover, low-impact yet highly-coordinated movement methods like Tai Chi and ballet are significantly beneficial for people with low bone density (i.e., osteoporosis), pain (i.e., fibromyalgia, MS) because load-bearing exercise improves bone density and repairs the myelin sheath. With better balance, coordination, agility, smooth motor skills and less disruption of the nerve function I think everyone with MS should take up Tai chi or ballet as a bi-weekly activity that can improve their quality of life. This combined with the right diet could help you walk away from disease.