Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Serious Games
Date Submitted: Feb 1, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 4, 2019 - Mar 28, 2019
Date Accepted: May 25, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Exergaming Improves Executive Functions in Patients With Metabolic Syndrome: Randomized Controlled Trial
Background:
Recent studies indicate that participation in exercise-related games can improve executive function, attention processing, and visuospatial skills.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to investigate whether exercise via exergaming (EXG) can improve executive function in patients with metabolic syndrome (MetS).
Methods:
A total of 22 MetS patients were recruited and randomly assigned to an EXG group or a treadmill exercise (TE) group. The reaction time (RT) and electrophysiological signals from the frontal (Fz), central (Cz), and parietal (Pz) cortices were collected during a Stroop task after 12 weeks of exercise.
Results:
During the Stroop congruence (facilitation) judgment task, both the EXG and TE groups showed significantly faster RT after 12 weeks of exercise training. For N200 amplitude, the EXG group demonstrated significantly increased electrophysiological signals from the Fz and Cz cortices. These changes were significantly larger in the EXG group than in the TE group. Separately, for the P300 amplitude, the EXG groups presented significantly increased electrophysiological signals from the Fz, Cz, and Pz cortices, whereas the TE group showed significantly increased electrophysiological signals from the Cz and Pz cortices only. During the Stroop incongruence (interference) judgment task, both the EXG and TE groups showed significantly faster RT. For P300 amplitude, the EXG group had significantly increased electrophysiological signals from the Fz and Cz cortices only, whereas the TE group had significantly increased electrophysiological signals from the Fz, Cz, and Pz cortices.
Conclusions:
EXG improves executive function in patients with MetS as much as normal aerobic exercise does. In particular, a unique benefit of EXG beyond increased aerobic capacity is the improved selective attention among cognitive functions. Thus, EXG could be recommended to someone who needs to improve their brain responses of concentration and judgment as well as physical fitness.
ClinicalTrial:
ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04015583; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04015583
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.