Lifestyle medicine in Parkinson’s disease

TL;DR

This paper reviews how lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, and stress management can help prevent and treat Parkinson’s disease.

Contribution

The paper introduces lifestyle medicine as a framework for understanding and managing Parkinson’s disease through non-pharmacological approaches.

Findings

Lifestyle medicine can modulate Parkinson’s disease risk and progression.

Physical activity, stress management, and dietary interventions show promise in PD prevention and treatment.

Microbiota-directed strategies and dietary patterns are emerging areas of interest in PD research.

Abstract

Lifestyle medicine is an evolving concept integrating preventive and therapeutic approaches related to physical activity, nutrition, sleep, stress management, social interaction, and cessation of substance abuse aiming to optimize health outcomes. Lifestyle consultation plays an essential and constantly growing role in clinical settings. In this review, we highlight the usability of lifestyle medicine as a framework for both well-established and novel roles of environmental triggers and non-pharmacological prevention and treatment in Parkinson’s Disease (PD). We summarize the current understanding of the modulation of PD risk and progression by lifestyle-related domains and provide a review of recent insights from approaches targeting physical activity and stress management as well as dietary interventions, including general dietary patterns, individual food groups, supplements, and microbiota-directed strategies in the context of PD. Importantly, we also identify current knowledge gaps and provide an outlook for future strategies to implement multidimensional, disease-specific, and stratified lifestyle medicine in the prevention and treatment of PD.

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