How To Manage Akinesia

Get Regular Exercise

Many daily activities involve the use of motor nerves. Everyone has routine behavior patterns developed over lifetimes and often call these to action automatically without conscious thought. It appears the motor controller in the brain calls on these resident patterns routinely. Metabolic issues, as in Parkinson's disease and availability of dopamine, may interfere with the implementation of those patterns, causing akinesia. Akinesia disrupts the application of the pattern to the muscles when the brain attempts to activate the engram coding the desired movement. Interference in Parkinson's disease appears at the basal ganglia. To bypass the basal ganglia, intentional movement needs to rely on higher levels of thinking.

Occupational therapy potentially offers exercise training that accomplishes the segregation of multitasks into separate smaller components as a reasonable bypass strategy in this regard. By establishing cues for regular activities to be removed from the multitask mode, akinesia is bypassed as the single task mode begins to work. If cue development utilizes alternative motor pathways efficiently for a person, cognitive and sensory attention strategies can be internalized. To get regular exercise in this manner involves establishing a positive attitude, mental rehearsal, internal dialogue, and visualization.

Learn more about managing akinesia now.