The Role of Exercise as a Treatment and Preventive Strategy during Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

On 11 March 2020, World Health Organization has made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic. COVID-19 is a usually self-limited infection but it can be present a severe and fatal disease in patients with comorbitidies and the elderly. The characteristics of the virus and general health condition of the host determine disease progression. Scientists have been investigating on the pathophysiology of this disease, diagnostic tools, effective treatment protocols, and the development a vaccine. Preventive strategies are as important as the treatment modalities. This review focuses on the pathophysiological mechanisms of COVID-19, in addition to the roles of exercise in the immunomodulatory mechanisms, host defense systems, and also prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Exercise exerts many important effects such as immunomodulation, augmented defense system on the immune system via mainly muscle derived myokines and increased cardiorespiratory endurance. CO-VID-19 pandemic once again demonstrated the importance of prophylactic approaches such as healthy life, maintaining and strengthening of health, and immune system modulation. This pandemic may start a period in which humanity prioritizes healthy living principles, functional foods, maintaining health and welfare approaches, and increased effort to develop and maintain them.

The effect of an online‐supervised exercise program in older people with diabetes on fasting blood sugar, psychological resilience and quality of life: A double blind randomised controlled trial

“…Exercise training is an important complementary treatment for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes (Duruturk & Özköslü, 2019). During the COVID‐19 pandemic, experts in mass media has emphasised the importance of exercising in addition to balanced nutrition and sleeping for 8–10 h a day to be strong against the virus (Yalçin et al, 2020). In the literature, positive effects of regular exercise on many issues, such as balancing blood pressure, blood glucose levels and decrease in HBA1C and insulin resistance, have been reported (Kafkas et al, 2017).…”

A novel spherical fuzzy AHP-VIKOR methodology to determine serving petrol station selection during COVID-19 lockdown: A pilot study for İstanbul

“…The first COVID-19 case in Turkey was detected on March 11, 2020. On the same date, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced this epidemic as a pandemic [ 3 ]. According to the reports published by WHO, there are more than seven million confirmed cases and more than four hundred thousand deaths in earlier June 2020 [ 4 ].…”

“…Intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFS), Pythagorean fuzzy sets (PFS), have some limitations that make these sets insufficient to handle uncertainty in information and capture the complete information. Namely, there is no function to represent the degree of hesitancy by decision-makers [ 3 ]. Recently, the SFS are introduced to literature address this.…”

A novel distance learning ergonomics checklist and risk evaluation methodology: A case of Covid‐19 pandemic

“…The epidemic spreads rapidly, and the existence of the virus was confirmed on all continents except Antarctica on January 26, 2020 (WHO, 2020a). The World Health Organization (WHO) announced on March 11 that COVID‐19 had become a pandemic (Yalçin et al, 2020). According to WHO reports, there are more than 49 million confirmed cases and more than one million deaths in earlier November 2020 (WHO, 2020b).…”