As a cornerstone of COPD management, a minimum goal of pulmonary rehabilitation is the maintenance of exercise tolerance and performance of activities of daily living (ADLs) [ 1].
The 15 home assessments were as described above with the exception of measures of exercise tolerance, muscle strength and blood sampling.
Despite current knowledge of WBV, as a standalone home-based mode of physical activity, efficacy has not been established for improvement or maintenance of exercise tolerance and functional performance of the lower limbs of people with COPD.
To assess the ability of field tests of exercise tolerance, such as the 6-minute walk test (6MWT) and incremental shuttle walk test (ISWT), to predict postoperative outcome following intra-abdominal surgery.
There is no single measure of COPD severity, and a patient's experience of the disease can be heavily influenced by, for example, the frequency of exacerbations, exercise tolerance, presence of co-morbidities and a range of psychological factors.
6 This is the determination of exercise tolerance through, for example, data from a field test such as the 6-minute walk test (6MWT), which explores the cardiorespiratory and muscle chain.
Hence, it has been proposed to use work efficiency as a better reflection of exercise tolerance [54, 56, 57].
In support of this notion, the improvements in measures of exercise tolerance (fitness) reported by Bourke et al may also be clinically important, given work by our group showing that exercise tolerance is a strong independent predictor of all-cause mortality in patients with non-small cell lung cancer and metastatic breast cancer (Jones et al, 2010, 2012a, 2012b).
Furthermore, WBV was more effective than SWBV for improvement of functional performance, yet comparable for acute markers of exercise tolerance.
First, elevated level of testosterone following replacement therapy is major indicator for increase of peak VO2 in affected men with heart failure explaining improvement of exercise tolerance in these patients [ 7, 8].
