A follow-up study of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) who participated in a 2-year intensive exercise program shows that the majority of participants continued exercising after the program had finished.
Furthermore, patients who continued exercising maintained their gains in muscle strength and improved functional ability even though participation in exercise was less frequent during the follow-up period.
Zuzana de Jong (Leiden University Medical Center, The Netherlands) and colleagues previously demonstrated that RA patients improved their physical capacity, functional ability and emotional status, and delayed the development of osteoporosis during a 2-year supervised high-intensity exercise program.
To evaluate the patients’ compliance with continued exercise once the program had finished, de Jong and team reassessed 71 (47%) of the original 151 participants 18 months later.
They found that 60 (84%) patients were still exercising, with average similar intensity, but at a lower frequency than the initial intervention. Eleven patients (16%) reported low intensity or no exercise. The researchers report that patients exercising had better aerobic fitness and functional ability, lower disease activity, and higher attendance rate after the initial 2-year intervention than those who were not.
At follow-up, aerobic fitness had deteriorated in both groups but functional ability remained stable. Patients exercising maintained their initial muscle strength gains but the muscle strength of the patients not exercising declined significantly during the follow-up period.
“Importantly, no detrimental effects on disease activity or radiologic damage of the large joints were found in either group,” note de Jong and co-authors in the journal Clinical Rheumatology.
The researchers acknowledge that their results should be interpreted with care because participants in the follow-up study formed a relatively small proportion (47%) of the original exercise group.
“Although we found that the baseline characteristics from the study participants did not differ from the non-participants, it cannot be ruled out that the participants were more motivated and/or had less physical problems and/or had more positive experiences [in the original study],” they conclude.