Morgan Walker B.S., ACSM EP-C October 6, 2016
Chronic conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), chronic heart failure (CHF), and type II diabetes mellitus (T2DM) are often caused by poor health choices and lack of exercise. The development of such a disease is slow, some people can even go years without symptoms until an event occurs to draw attention to the problem. In the case of CHF, those events are often fatal. Eventually, the symptoms and risk of an event causes the person to become sedentary and the disease progresses. Therefore, exercise is the key to prevention and management of such diseases.
The physical and mental benefits of exercise are plenty. For people with chronic conditions, exercise offers improved quality of life. For example, people with myocardial ischemia1 and those with COPD2 participating in an exercise program had significantly fewer hospital readmissions in the intervention group than the control (14% vs 5% for ischemia and 10 vs 5 readmissions for COPD). Furthermore, every 1 MET level increase in activity intensity decreases mortality by 13%.3 However, the overload to gain these benefits must be specific.
In the next several blogs, each chronic condition will be defined and the FITT principle will be described. FITT stands for frequency, intensity, time or duration, and type. The FITT principle is used to monitor the specificity of an exercise program. Each condition has a different FITT principle. For this reason, the clinical population requires special attention and training on behalf of the clinical exercise physiologist (CEP).
REFERENCES
1 Santaularia N, Caminal J, Arnau A, Perramon M, Montesinos J et al. The efficacy of a supervised exercise training programme on readmission rates in patients with myocardial ischemia: results from a randomised controlled trial. Eur J Cardiovasc Nurs. 2016 May 9.
2 Johnson-Warrington V, Rees K, Gelder C, Morgan MD, Singh SJ. Can a supported self-management program for COPD upon hospital discharge reduce readmissions? A randomized controlled trial. Int J Chron Obstruct Pulmon Dis. 2016 Jun 2;11:1161-9.
3 TACSM Lecture Series 2015.
“I was walking and my husband was telling me to slow down because he couldn’t keep up with me.”
ReplyDeleteDenise F. lived with COPD and chronic asthma for many years. When her quality of life continued to decline, Denise decided to try something different.While being with her horses brought her peace and joy, not being able to breathe made spending time with them challenging. When her grandchildren would visit, she couldn’t even participate in their activities.
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