ABSTRACT

Background: Fatigue is a significant debilitating symptom which is often neglected by health care professionals in clinical practice.

Aim: The aim of the study was to determine the acute effect of a single bout of 10 minutes and 15 minutes aerobic exercise on general and physical fatigue in patients with KOA.

Methods: A quasi-experimental study with a follow-up arm. Forty six participants with KOA and were randomly assigned into a 10 minutes aerobic exercise (10AEG) and 15 minutes aerobic exercise (15AEG) groups, with the bicycle ergometer as the exercise mode. Pain intensity, general fatigue and physical fatigue of participants were assessed at baseline, pre exercise, immediately after the exercise, 10 minutes post exercise and 20 minutes post exercise using the visual analog scale (VAS), numerical rating scale for general (NRS-FG) and physical fatigue (NRS-FP) respectively. Descriptive statistics, Friedman’s ANOVA, Mann-Whitney U and Generalized estimating equation were used to analyse the data (P set at 0.05).

Results: The age of the participants ranged from 40-79 years and the mean age was 67.09±1.85 years for 10AEG and 66.96±2.03 for 15AEG participants. There was a significant difference (reduction) in pain (p<0.001), general fatigue at immediately after aerobic exercise intervention (p=0.028) and physical fatigue level at immediately after aerobic (p=0.036) exercise intervention within each groups. There[U1]  was no significant difference on pain (p=0.920), general (p=0.915) and physical (p=0.997) fatigue levels between the two groups.

Conclusion: Aerobic exercise using the bicycle ergometer is a promising intervention for pain reduction and amelioration of general fatigue and physical fatigue symptoms in patients with KOA.

Keywords: Knee Osteoarthritis, general fatigue, physical fatigue, aerobic exercise, bicycle ergometer.

 [U1]For GF where did the difference lie and for PF??