Exercise can help support recovery of patients with lasting COVID symptoms, study finds
2021-05-07
(Press-News.org) Patients with lasting symptoms of COVID-19 who completed a six week, supervised rehabilitation programme demonstrated significant improvements in exercise capacity, respiratory symptoms, fatigue and cognition, according to researchers at the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Leicester Biomedical Research Centre - a partnership between Leicester's Hospitals, the University of Leicester and Loughborough University.
The study, which is published in the journal Chronic Respiratory Disease today (Friday 7 May 2021), followed thirty patients who took part in face-to-face exercise rehabilitation classes twice a week over a period of six weeks. The programme included aerobic exercise, such as walking or using a treadmill, strength training of the arms and legs, and educational discussions to support symptom management based upon the information on the Your COVID Recovery platform.
Researchers found a statistically significant improvement in exercise capacity, as measured by scores of distance travelled and ability to keep going without a rest using incremental and endurance shuttle-walking tests. They also found that fatigue improved by 5 points on the Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy (FACIT) Fatigue Scale over the six-week period. In addition, participants demonstrated improvement in their overall wellbeing and cognition, as measured by standardised clinical assessment tools.
Participants were referred through a hospital discharge follow-up telephone assessment, at a face-to-face COVID-19 clinic assessment, or via their GP. Individuals were offered the opportunity to take part if they displayed physical and/or psychological symptoms that were affecting their daily activities. Patients were excluded if they demonstrated acute symptoms, or were not medically stable (such as uncontrolled diabetes) or had only symptoms that were deemed unlikely to benefit from a pulmonary rehabilitation programme, such as loss of taste or smell.
Of the participants, there was an even split between men and women, with an average of 58 years. Eighty-seven per cent of participants were admitted to hospital with COVID-19, staying on average 10 days in hospital. Fourteen per cent required mechanical ventilation and were treated in an Intensive Care Unit. Four individuals had a pre-existing respiratory condition, such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
Dr Enya Daynes, specialist pulmonary rehabilitation and research physiotherapist at Leicester's Hospitals and lead author of the study, said: "We know that COVID-19 survivors present with a wide variety of symptoms and that a one-size-fits-all approach to managing these would not be appropriate. However, there are some overlap between the needs of COVID-19 survivors and patients who have accessed pulmonary rehabilitation [PR] for other conditions, such as COPD. So we modified our well-established PR course for COVID-19 survivors and measured their symptoms to assess whether the programme could be of potential benefit.
"We found there were significant improvements in clinical outcomes of walking capacity and symptoms of fatigue, cognition and respiratory symptoms - factors that patients tell us most affect their quality of life."
Professor Sally Singh, head of cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation at Leicester's Hospitals, professor at the University of Leicester and senior author of the paper, said: "This adapted rehabilitation programme for individuals following COVID-19 has demonstrated promising improvements in clinical outcomes. There were no drop-outs due to worsening symptoms and the high completion rate suggests that patients found it to be an acceptable treatment.
"There has been concern that rehabilitation may worsen or trigger symptoms of post-viral fatigue and that exercise therapy may exacerbate fatigue. The exercise element of this programme is progressed by staff experienced in delivering pulmonary and cardiac rehabilitation programmes in line with patient's symptoms throughout the programme. Our results did not show that fatigue worsened among the group of patients on the study, and that many of their symptoms improved. This suggests an adapted pulmonary rehabilitation courses can be part of a spectrum of patient-centred and holistic approaches to treating the many different presentations of lasting COVID symptoms."
The research team acknowledges that as a cohort study there is no control group of people with similar symptoms who did not embark on the modified pulmonary rehabilitation course to offer a comparison and that further studies with a larger patient population are needed to confirm their preliminary findings.
INFORMATION:
The paper 'Early experiences of rehabilitation for individuals post-COVID to improve fatigue, breathlessness exercise capacity and cognition - A cohort study' is published in the journal, Chronic Respiratory Disease here.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-05-07
Dispersal is an important process governing the persistence of wild animal populations. Upon reaching sexual maturity, individuals usually disperse from their natal home range to search for suitable habitat and mates for reproduction. As such, dispersal promotes gene flow among populations, allows rescuing small and isolated populations, and enables the colonization of unoccupied habitats. In human-dominated landscapes, however, dispersing animals find it increasingly difficult to cross densely populated areas that separate suitable habitats. For this reason, the identification and preservation of wildlife corridors has become of utmost importance for conservation authorities worldwide.
In southern Africa, the governments ...
2021-05-07
Inclusion of soybean and linseed oils in the diet of dairy cows made the fatty acid content of their milk even healthier for human nutrition. It also increased the proportions of omega-6 and omega-3, which in the right balance play a key role in preventing cardiovascular diseases, for example, as well as chronic inflammation and some kinds of cancer.
Cardiovascular diseases are one of the world’s main public health problems. In Brazil, they are among the foremost causes of death. Each year some 300,000 Brazilians have heart attacks, dying in 30% of cases, according to the Health Ministry.
Research led by Arlindo Saran Netto, a professor at the University of São Paulo’s School of Animal Science and Food Engineering (FZEA-USP) in Pirassununga, São Paulo ...
2021-05-07
People spend about 80-90% of their time indoors. Compared to outdoor air quality, the indoor air quality is more relevant to people's health. Therefore, understanding the levels, sources and evolution of particulate matter (PM) indoors is important for the accurate evaluation of people's health risks to aerosol exposure.
A research team led by Prof. Yele Sun from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences deployed a time-of-flight aerosol chemical speciation monitor (ToF-ACSM) to measure time series and mass spectra of non-refractory species in a typical academic office in IAP. The study was published in Indoor Air.
The researchers measured the concentration and chemical composition of indoor PM2.5 ...
2021-05-07
To understand the world, we arrange individual objects, people, and events into different categories or concepts. Concepts such as 'the telephone' consist primarily of visible features, i.e. shape and color, and sounds, such as ringing. In addition, there are actions, i.e. how we use a telephone.
However, the concept of telephone does not only arise in the brain when we have a telephone in front of us. It also appears when the term is merely mentioned. If we read the word "telephone", our brain also calls up the concept of telephone. The same regions in the brain are activated that would be activated ...
2021-05-07
To infect its host plant maize, the fungal parasite Ustilago maydis uses a complex of seven proteins. Numerous findings reveal an essential role of the complex in causing disease and suggest a widespread occurence in fungal plant pathogens.
Each year, fungal plant pathogens such as rusts, rice blast and mildews destroy huge amounts of cereal crops that could feed millions of people. Many of these fungi are biotrophic pathogens: Instead of killing their host plants, they manipulate host cells to assure that these sustain fungal growth. Among these pathogens, the corn smut fungus Ustilago maydis has emerged as a model for basic research on biotrophic fungi.
During the infection, U. maydis releases an entire cocktail of so-called ...
2021-05-07
7 May 2021/Kiel. Corals are the backbone of marine ecosystems in the tropics. They are threatened by rising water temperatures caused by global warming and they are among the first ecosystems worldwide that are on the verge of ecological collapse. Coral bleaching, which is becoming stronger and more frequent due to heat stress, has already wiped out corals at many locations globally. With the help of a microbiome-targeting strategy developed by an international team led by GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, it could become feasible to help protect corals from heat stress. The work has now been published in the international journal Microbiome.
Corals are the backbone of marine ecosystems in the tropics. They are threatened by rising water temperatures caused by global warming ...
2021-05-07
Narrow-gap semiconductors with the ability to use visible light have garnered significant interest thanks to their versatility. Now, scientists in Japan have developed and characterized a new semiconductor material for application in process components stimulated by light. The findings have, for the first time, suggested a new way to reduce the band gap in cheaper and non-toxic tin-based oxide semiconductors for efficient light-based applications.
Semiconductors that can exploit the omnipresent visible spectrum of light for different technological applications would serve as a boon to the material world. However, such semiconductors often do not come cheap and can often be toxic. Now, a group of material scientists ...
2021-05-07
May 7, 2021 - Among collegiate football players and other athletes, Black athletes recognize fewer concussion-related symptoms than their White counterparts, reports a study in the May/June issue of the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation (JHTR). The official journal of the Brain Injury Association of America, JHTR is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.
"Despite NCAA concussion education requirements for athletes, Black collegiate-athletes were found to have lower concussion symptom knowledge than White collegiate-athletes," according to the new research by Jessica Wallace, PhD, MPH, LAT, ATC, of University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and colleagues. The ...
2021-05-07
RNA-based drugs have the potential to change the standard of care for many diseases, making personalized medicine a reality. This rapidly expanding class of therapeutics are cost-effective, fairly easy to manufacture, and able to go where no drug has gone before, reaching previously undruggable pathways.
Mostly.
So far, these promising drugs haven't been very useful in getting through to the well-protected brain to treat tumors or other maladies.
Now a multi-institutional team of researchers, led by Costas Arvanitis at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, has figured out a way: using ultrasound and RNA-loaded nanoparticles to get through the protective blood-brain barrier and deliver potent medicine to brain tumors.
"We're able to make this drug more available ...
2021-05-07
Some meat eaters feel disgusted by meat, according to a new study.
University of Exeter scientists showed food pictures to more than 700 people, including omnivores (who eat meat and other foods), flexitarians (who try to eat less meat) and vegetarians.
About 7% of meat eaters (15% of flexitarians and 3% of omnivores) had a "fairly strong disgust response" to images of meat dishes commonly eaten in the UK, like roast chicken or bacon.
As a group, omnivores rated meat images about twice as disgusting on average as pictures of carbohydrate-rich foods like bread, chips and rice.
Based on the findings, the researchers say harnessing the "yuk factor" may ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Exercise can help support recovery of patients with lasting COVID symptoms, study finds
