ABSTRACT
Many people recovering from an acute episode of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) experience prolonged symptoms. Exercise testing is a feasible and cost-effective option for assessing exercise tolerance, fatigue, and dyspnea related to effort. Being that the Chester step test (CST) is a progressive, submaximal test for predicting aerobic capacity, it could be a good option to explore. This study aimed to determine the reproducibility of CST for assessing exertional desaturation and exercise capacity in patients post-COVID-19 disease. A cross-sectional study was conducted on post-COVID-19 patients. Two attempts of the CST were performed. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to assess agreement between the two tests. Forty-two symptomatic post-COVID-19 patients were included, the mean age was 53.8 ± 10.3 years, and 52% were female. There was no significant difference between both tests (p = 0.896). Twenty-four percent of participants (10 cases) had a clinically significant decrease in SpO2 at the first assessment, compared to 30.1% (13 cases) at the second, with no significant difference. An ICC of 0.993 (95% CI: 0.987 to 0.996) was obtained for the total number of steps in the CST.
ABSTRACT
Due to the sequelae of the coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19), clinical guidelines have had to develop follow-up programmes focused on imaging, lung function, symptoms and physical capacity [1, 2]. To assess functional capacity, field tests are recommended, such as the 6-min walking test (6MWT) or the 1-min sit-to-stand test (STST) [3, 4]. The advantage of these tests is that they have been widely demonstrated to be useful in assessing functional capacity in respiratory chronic diseases and can be performed in low-resource settings [5]. The 1-min sit-to-stand test is a repeatable field test without differences between the first and second tests. Hence, conducting one attempt of the 1-min STST would be enough to evaluate functional capacity in patients recovered from #COVID19.https://bit.ly/3y3ycAP