Chest
Clinical InvestigationsNeuromuscular DiseaseReliability of Maximal Respiratory Pressures in Multiple Sclerosis
Section snippets
Materials and Methods
This descriptive, comparative study with repeated measures was designed to determine the number of testing sessions and number of measurements within a testing session needed by patients with MS and healthy control subjects to obtain reproducible results.
Number of Testing Sessions
The means of 10 Pemax and 10 Pimax values of the four separate testing sessions were calculated for the MS patient group and the healthy control group (Table 2). Mean Pemax values in MS patients differed by testing session [F (3, 71) = 15.513; p = 0.0001] with the following specific differences detected by post-hoc analyses: session 1 vs 3, 1 vs 4, 2 vs 3, and 2 vs 4. Mean Pimax values in MS patients also differed by testing session [F(3, 71) = 24.91; p = 0.0001]. Specific differences were
Number of Testing Sessions
The findings of this study indicate that two practice sessions are required by MS patients and one practice session by healthy control subjects to obtain consistent Pimax and Pemax values by the third and the second testing sessions, respectively. These findings suggest a learning effect and are consistent with those of other researchers who have studied healthy control subjects and patients with pulmonary disease. They also suggest that learning takes longer in persons with MS than in healthy
Conclusion
Accurate periodic Pimax and Pemax measurements are useful in identifying both the need for interventions directed toward respiratory muscle weakness in impaired MS subjects who are unable to participate in physical activity and strategies to preserve respiratory muscle strength in persons with MS. The results of this study suggest a learning effect as a factor that needs to be considered in Pimax and Pemax measurement. Failure to take this learning effect into account may result in inaccurate
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Supported by National Institute of Nursing Research, National Institutes of Health grant R15NR02763–01.