COPD6 - Perceived Health Benefit After Pulmonary Rehabilitation

Perceived health benefit after Pulmonary Rehabilitation - A report of the CoHoRT study of pulmonary rehabilitation.

JC Waterhouse1 MC Clarke1 SJ Walters2 RA Lawson1

Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust 1 and School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield 2

In a recent UK Health Technology Assessment Board funded study to assess the outcome of pulmonary rehabilitation, per cent change in Endurance Shuttle Walking Test (ESWT) was used as primary outcome measure. Whilst this is a robust, validated measure of exercise capacity, its relationship to perceived change in health is less clear. Before they performed the ESWT, patients were asked how they rated the overall change in their health following pulmonary rehabilitation. There was a clear relationship between the two. An increase in ESWT below 60% was unlikely to result in perceived benefit. An increase of greater than 100% was required to be confident of benefit.

Description	n	Mean change in time (minutes)	% change in time
WORSE	16	0.15	21
SAME	75	4.39	78
Almost the same, hardly any better at all	0
A little better	18	3.60	61
Somewhat better	12	5.20	100
Moderately Better	27	4.90	92
A good deal better	30	5.98	110
A great deal better	9	6.24	114
A very great deal better	1

Interestingly, a significant group of patients have a large increase in ESWT but express no perceived benefit to their overall health.

Back to Abstracts Menu