Effect of aquatic exercise on the multiple sclerosis patients' quality of life

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The appearance of a new innovation in medical science named aquatic exercise has faded the effects of other preventive exercises in patients with multiple sclerosis to a large extent. Since exercise is one of the beneficial factors in enhancement of quality of life, researchers decided to investigate the role of aquatic exercise on the patients' quality of life.

METHODS: This study is a semi experimental research that was performed on 22 patients chosen by simple random sampling. The standard SF-36 questionnaire was used and data was gathered by interview before and after aquatic exercise. Data was analyzed by paired t test via SPSS software version 10.

RESULTS: The mean ages of participants were 32.86 from all, 68.2% of participants were married and 45.5% of them were high school graduates. The paired t test showed the significant differences between different aspects of quality of life before and after aquatic exercise.

CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this research revealed that aquatic exercise has enhanced the aspects of multiple sclerosis patients' quality of life; therefore the program of this exercise is suggested to be used for the patients with multiple sclerosis along with other methods of treatment for improvement in quality of their lives.

KEY WORDS: Multiple sclerosis, aquatic exercise, quality of life.