EC Pulmonology and Respiratory Medicine

>Long COVID is a major health problem all over the world after the COVID-19 pandemic. Increasing evidence suggests that pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) effectively reduces the symptoms, leads to health benefits and improves the exercise tolerance of patients with post-COVID-19. That evidence, however, has been generated so far among patients from the indoor settings of hospitals. The present study was conducted to investigate the benefits of an outdoor-based PR program on the exercise performance and respiratory function of post-COVID-19 patients. A total of 99 COVID-19-positive patients from an OPD-based PR centre were enrolled in a prospective study with a serial cross-sectional design. All the subjects followed an 8-week comprehensive multimodal and multidisciplinary pulmonary rehabilitation schedule. Spirometry and endurance shuttle walk tests (ESWT) were performed before and after the rehabilitation program. The minimal clinical important difference (MCID) was used as an indicator for the response of individual subjects to the PR program. A proportion of 75% and 55% of subjects were improved by walk distance and time in ESWT respectively. On spirometry, 57% of FVC (L), 61% of FVC (%), 48% of FEV1 (L) and 31% of FEV1 (%) subjects were improved after the PR program by MCID among the 91 subjects. On pooling all data together, 36% of subjects were found to show clinically meaningful improvements in pulmonary function [FVC (%)] when a 10% increase was taken as the cut-off point. A negative association was evident on the adjustment of the effects of age and BMI during multiple regression analysis with ‘post-PR % predicted FVC’ as the outcome variable. The present data suggest that an OPD-based pulmonary rehabilitation program, even with a relatively short duration, has a beneficial effect on exercise endurance and pulmonary function among subjects affected by long-term COVID problems.

 Keywords: Post-COVID; Long COVID; Pulmonary Rehabilitation; Lung Function; Bangladesh

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