The Effectiveness of Aerobic Exercise Training on Positive and Negative Symptoms of Patients with Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder with positive and negative symptoms in its prognosis. Exercise-based interventions as an effective non-therapeutic approach play a very important role in the rehabilitation and management of these patients due to their mental and physical effects. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of aerobic exercise training in improving the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenic patients admitted to the center of treatment and rehabilitation.
This interventional study was a pretest-posttest design. Samples included 24 male schizophrenic patients admitted to Darlashfah Medical Treatment and Rehabilitation Center in Ardabil. They were selected by simple random sampling and randomly assigned into intervention and control groups. The intervention group participated in aerobic exercise training for 12 sessions of 45 minutes, but the control group did not receive any intervention. To collect the data was used the scale of positive and negative symptoms in schizophrenic patients (SAPS) and data were analyzed by Chi square and covariance analysis in SPSSv16.
The results indicated that the mean of positive symptoms11.54 and nagative symptoms 11.55 Have dropped In the intervention group Compared to the mean of positive symptoms, 17.72 and negative symptoms 23.22 in control groups in the post-test respectively. Aerobic exercise therapy had a significant difference between the intervention and control groups in decreasing the positive symptoms (FF=5.54, p=0.031, and negative F=9.17, p=0.007). In addition, the Eta coefficient for positive and negative symptoms was 0.22 and 0.33, respectively, meaning that aerobic exercise intervention was able to explain 22% of changes in positive symptoms and 33% of changes in negative symptoms.
Aerobic exercise training in daily schedules of hospitalized patients with schizophrenia can improve positive and negative symptoms and decrease overall hallucinations and delusions of the patients and prevent the many problems and related consequences.