A professional ballerina gave up her career to research how dance benefits patients with multiple sclerosis , with the findings hailed as “ground-breaking” by experts.
While working in America, Ms Davis was a volunteer researcher in neurorehabilitation at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and she chose to focus on MS in Scotland, which has one of the highest incidence rates of the disease in the world. Ms Davis’ PhD study includes Dance for Multiple Sclerosis – A Systematic Review, which was hailed the sixth most read research paper in the International Journal of MS Care in 2023. Her research was funded with a Thouron scholarship.
She said the research was inspired by English National Ballet’s programme Dance for Parkinson’s, described as a “very well-established global model”, but said applying the same theory to MS was “a novel area of both practice and research”. “My research is looking at their SB Elevate classes here in Glasgow, where the programme first began development in 2018, and then looks at their more recently implemented SB Elevate classes further north in Perth and Orkney to find out what benefits the dancers with MS are experiencing.
“People with MS can have problems with movement and balance which can be helped with exercise. Ballet is a form of physical activity which may be more expressive, fun and with a stronger social component than traditional forms of rehabilitation.