Original ArticleEffects of an Exercise Program in Children with Cystic Fibrosis: Are There Differences between Females and Males?
Section snippets
Methods
Data were collected from 344 children, adolescents, and adults with CF (158 female; 186 male; ages from 7 to 43 years) (Table I). All subjects were attending a specialized inpatient rehabilitation clinic for CF owned by the German social security organizations in Nebel. The duration of the rehabilitation course was 6 weeks. The criteria for inclusion were the following: clinically stable, no medical contraindications for exercise testing, and participating in an exercise training program. Home
Results
All participants completed the training program. Statistically significant differences were found between sexes for anthropometric data. Males were older (P < .01), taller (P < .001), and weighed more (P < .001, Table I). Weight (P < .001) and BMI (P < .001) increased after training in both male and females, and the magnitude of improvement was comparable between sexes (P > .05).
At admission and at discharge, lung function showed differences between the groups. FEV1 and VC were higher (P < .01)
Discussion
The results of this 6-week inpatient rehabilitation and exercise training study demonstrated a beneficial effect on exercise capacity and lung function in both females and males with CF. These findings are in accordance which other studies, which have also shown that an exercise training program may lead to an improvement of exercise capacity and lung function in CF.1, 5
The maximum exercise capacity, expressed as VO2peak and Wpeak in absolute and relative terms, was significantly lower in
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Rethinking physical exercise training in the modern era of cystic fibrosis: A step towards optimising short-term efficacy and long-term engagement: Rethinking physical exercise training in CF
2022, Journal of Cystic FibrosisCitation Excerpt :Such results are generally not observed in studies with balanced sex distribution [70] or in those that predominantly focus on males [71–73]. As proposed earlier, decreased neuromuscular abilities at young age may negatively influence PA and sports participation, which are generally lower in girls compared to boys with CF [74–76]. Considering these elements and the absence of sex-specific training responses and adaptations [74], it seems particularly relevant to encourage early initiation of INT in young girls with CF.
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2020, Respiratory Medicine Case ReportsImprovement in body composition following a supervised exercise-training program of adult patients with cystic fibrosis
2019, Respiratory Medicine and ResearchCitation Excerpt :The observation that the short-term ET program significantly improved exercise capacity is consistent with previous studies demonstrating the beneficial effects of ET on exercise tolerance and quality of life for patients with chronic respiratory diseases [33], including CF [5]. Our results are also in agreement with several studies of CF patients that reported improvements in exercise capacity (peak VO2) and/or 6MWT distance [8,25,34–36] and muscle strength [23,37] after exercise interventions performed in the context of supervised programs [8,23,25] or partially supervised/unsupervised home-based programs [34,35,38]. In a study of severely affected CF adults (FEV1 < 40%), Gruber et al. showed that lung function remained unchanged but VO2 peak significantly increased after a 6-week (5 sessions/week) ET program [7].
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2014, Journal of Cystic FibrosisCitation Excerpt :Also the SEP participants showed improvements in their maximal and submaximal exercise tolerance, which is consistent with training studies from healthy people after a continuous training program of six week duration [24]. Moreover the results are similar to those found in the literature in CF although the interventions were heterogeneous with respect to duration of exercise training, session duration, specific training modalities disease severity and age [1,2,8,9,11,12,21]. The changes we observed in the current study in SEP in maximal exercise capacity were comparable to improvements we recently found after 4–6 week exercise training in CF regardless of disease severity [2,30].
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2020, Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism
Supported by the Deutsche Rentenversicherung Nord. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.