Regional
(2010-01-11)
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GREELEY, CO
(KUNC) -
It may take two to tango. But when twelve people are involved - it becomes an unlikely medical study. KUNC commentator Dr. Marc Ringel has more.
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How could I resist doing a piece based on the title of this article: "Short duration, intensive tango dancing for Parkinson disease: An uncontrolled pilot study"? Sounds fascinating, doesn't it?
Before I go on, though, let me clear up one thing. "Uncontrolled pilot" does not refer to people who fly airplanes or steer tugboats whose tremors have not been reined-in. A pilot study is an initial glimpse at a problem, a project done mostly to suggest directions that are likely to be productive for further research. Theoretically, scientific and statistical standards for pilot studies can be a little lax in an effort to cast a wide net in shallow water, hoping to catch a number of leads, rather than dropping a hook in deep to firmly snag a real truth.
"Uncontrolled," in this context, means that the researchers didn't assign the people they examined to study and control groups. One way of doing clinical research is to treat half the subjects, the intervention group, and not treat the other half, the controls. Then you compare the outcome of those who: took the new drug; walked a mile a day; took tango lessons; slept with wool socks on their feet; etc. to the outcome of those who didn't. If it can avoid enough confounding factors a controlled study may be able to say with some authority that the drug or exercise or socks was why the people in the intervention group were healthier, functioned better, lived longer, or at least had warmer feet.
The "Tango" paper, published last year in Complimentary Therapies in Medicine, had no control group. The scientists who performed the study merely subjected 14 Parkinson patients of the Washington University School of Medicine Movement Disorders Center to 10 1-1/2 hour group tango lessons over the course of 2 weeks. Using standardized tests, the subjects were assessed one week prior to the classes for movement, walking, and balance, and again in the week following their lessons.
For the 12 subjects who completed the dance classes (one dropped out due to back pain and the other because of a death in the family), the lessons apparently did them a world of good. Their balance, gait and overall function improved quite significantly.
The effect, I think, is sort of like singing for stutterers, who suffer from a kind of movement disorder of their vocal apparatus. Stuttering speech loses its fluidity, getting stuck in neurological ruts in somewhat the same way that movements of Parkinson patients seem to get jammed into certain frozen or tremulous positions. Dancing acts as sort of a flywheel, lending momentum to the body-in-motion, mirrored in the underlying nervous system's control mechanism, that helps the dancer to glide over some of the potholes.
Why did the study authors choose the Argentine dance in particular? It's certainly not reflected in their Anglo surnames of Hackney and Gammon. And they don't say anything about their choice of dance in the report. All I can imagine is the tango looks like an awful lot of fun. Fun is itself therapeutic. If this had been a controlled study, it is definitely one in which I'd have wanted to be in the intervention group.
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