Exercise helps chronic kidney disease patients
Wednesday October 5th, 2011
A new review has concluded that regular exercise can benefit people with long-term kidney disease.
Chronic kidney disease is defined as damaged or poorly-performing kidneys for more than three months, and can be due to high blood pressure, diabetes and rheumatic diseases. Patients often lose fitness and may have trouble with normal daily tasks.
Review author Dr Susanne Heiwe of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, says: "Their muscles tend to tire quickly, which reduces the amount of exercise they do, but this then further reduces their fitness."
Many studies have looked at exercise and chronic kidney disease but reliable guidelines are lacking, so the review team analysed 45 reliable studies involving a total of 1,863 patients.
Results showed that adult patients - those who do not yet need dialysis, those on dialysis, and those who had a kidney transplant - all benefitted from exercise.
Different types of exercise led to different benefits. Supervised, high intensity cardiovascular training for four to six months was linked to significantly improved aerobic capacity.
Three months of regular, high intensity resistance training or yoga, with or without supervision, increased muscular strength and, when supervised, the high intensity resistance training also increased walking capacity.
The review is published in The Cochrane Library. Dr Heiwe hopes it will aid recommendations on prescribing exercise training.
He says: "More research is needed so we can discover how to set up exercise programs that get the desired outcome as efficiently as possible. We need to know more about the effects of resistance training or mixed cardiovascular and resistance training."
Tags: Europe | Fitness | Internal Medicine
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