Abstract
Conservative treatment, including exercise therapy, is considered the first choice of treatment for intermittent claudication in peripheral artery disease (PAD). Among exercise therapies, supervised exercise therapy is available in a limited number of facilities and many patients do not have the opportunity to receive it due to lack of time for hospital visits or hospitalisation. Therefore, we investigated the current status of unsupervised home exercise therapy and examined the usefulness of home exercise therapy. Forty-two patients attending the Department of Vascular Surgery, Tokyo Medical and Dental University School of Medicine, with PAD, were assessed using the ‘Simple version of the facilitators and inhibitors of exercise habit scale’, the Stage Of Change for exercise behaviour (SOC), Vascu QOL-6 and WIQ questionnaires, and vascular function tests including ankle-brachial blood pressure ratio (ABI) and ABI recovery time after a one-minute treadmill walk. A calendar to record daily steps was then distributed as an aid to home exercise therapy, and the patients were re-evaluated after three months. The results show that the highest facilitating factor for PAD patients was ‘improving health and fitness’, while the inhibiting factor was ‘laziness’. It was also found that the inhibiting factor ‘laziness’ was lower for patients in the behaviour change stage maintenance phase of exercise habits than for those in the indifferent and interested phases. Furthermore, patients who used pedometers had higher VascuQOL-6 scores, more days of exercise per week and a higher proportion of those who made an effort to walk than those who did not use pedometers.
Presenters
Rieko MashiyamaAssociate Professor, Clinical Laboratory Science, Teikyo University, Tokyo, Japan
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
Interdisciplinary Health Sciences
KEYWORDS
Cardiocerebrovascular Disease, Health Behavior
