Even though pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) improves exercise capacity and quality of life (QOL) in patients with chronic lung diseases, not many patients can attend the hospital based intensive PR in Koera. Therefore we developed a simple and easy home-based PR program and investigated the efficacy of it. Forty-three male patients with stable chronic lung disease were divided into a rehabilitation group (n = 25) and a control group (n= 18) according to the feasibility of visiting a hospital every other week for evaluation and a new exercise regimen. Rehabilitation comprised education and 12 weeks of enforced aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercises. Patients performed aerobic exercise training mostly by walking, based on their functional capacity assessed by a maximal incremental exercise test. Five patients dropped out of the rehabilitation group but only one of these withdrew because of noncom-pliance. Five of the controls did not comply with a second evaluation. After 12 weeks of rehabilitation, exercise capacity (maximum work load and VO2max), exercise endurance, six-minute walking distance, and quality of life measured by the St. George Respiratory Questionnaire were significantly improved in the rehabilitation group, but not in the controls. At a follow-up evaluation 15 months after the rehabilitation, some exercise parameters were still significantly higher than baseline in the rehabilitation group. These data suggest that our home-based pulmonary rehabilitation program is well acceptable to the patients and effective.
展开▼
