Sports Participation Might Help Schizophrenia to Recover by using weight gain, psychiatric symptoms and brain activation.

Bismillah. Assalammualaikum

First and foremost, I would like to dedicate this post to a forum handled by Psychological Services Unit of IIUM on 16 October 2014. Throughout the forum, I gained lots of new knowledge and its open my mind wider to understand better a living medical disorder like Schizophrenia. Thank you to the organizer and all the speakers for being very supportive and compassionate during the forum despite of discomfort due to air-conditioner dysfunctional.

Secondly, let us go straight to the topic that I want to talk about which is the contribution of sports participation on schizophrenia patient. Before we go further, how many of us think that schizophrenia patient might not involve in sports? Do you think because of their in capabilities like lack of emotional expression, lack of interest and disorganized speech, they might not have interest in sports like a normal people? How if we as society want to help them through sports participation? Would them survive and function normally? These are among the questions that popped in my mind during the forum.  

I believe that sports involvement can bring brighter future to schizophrenia patient. That is when a moment I try to search out any research conducted on this issue. Unfortunately there is not much of them. However I managed to find one interesting study by Tahakashi et al (2012). The researchers examined the effectiveness of sports participation on weight gain, psychiatric symptoms and brain activation towards schizophrenia patient.  I believe that there are several effects of sport participation on psychiatric symptoms and brain activations during sports observation in schizophrenia.

First of all, it has been worldwide known that weight gain has been noticed as one of the predictor for mortality rates of schizophrenia patient. To do something about weight, exercise in one of the effective intervention and tool. I would like to quote the abstract from the study mentioned above.

           

“Thirteen schizophrenia patients who participated in a 3-month program, including sports participation and 10 control schizophrenia patients were studied. In both groups, body mass index (BMI), Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), and brain activation during observation of sports-related actions measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging were accessed before and after a 3-month interval. BMI and general psychopathology scale of PANSS were significantly reduced in the program group but not in the control group after a 3-month interval. Compared with baseline, activation of the body-selective extra striate body area (EBA) in the posterior temporal-occipital cortex during observation of sports-related actions was increased in the program group. In this group, increase in EBA activation was associated with improvement in the general psychopathology scale of PANSS. Sports participation had a positive effect not only on weight gain but also on psychiatric symptoms in schizophrenia. EBA might mediate these beneficial effects of sports participation. Our findings merit further investigation of neurobiological mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effect of sports for schizophrenia,” (Tahakashi et. al, 2012, page 1)

From the abstract, it clearly mentioned about the result in which involvement in sport will lead positive effect on weight gain as well as psychiatric symptoms in schizophrenia. Before I end this post, while writing this article, something come across my mind which is are there sports negative impacts on study and learning process? By leaving this post end like this, let us ponder and think about the topic. Bye.Wasalam

http://www.medicinenet.com/schizophrenia_pictures_slideshow/article.htm