RETRACTED: Effect of aerobic training on airflow obstruction, vo2 max, EIB in stable asthmatic children

Abstract

Children with bronchial asthma, primarily those with a clinically more severe disease, tend to have a sedentary lifestyle and therefore be in-clined to have lower aerobic fitness than their healthy non-asthmatic peers. Aerobic training has a number of well known beneficial effects in both normal and asthmatic children. However, the impact of training on the clinical manage-ment of the underlying bronchial asthma re-mains controversial, particularly in the most severe patients. Clinical evaluation, spirometric tests, symptom limited maximum exercise test-ing, and exercise challenge tests were per-formed in a group of children with stable mod-erate to severe asthma. Forty two patients (24 boys) aged 8-16 were evaluated twice: before and after supervised aerobic training (group 1, n = 26) and two months apart (untrained group 2, n = 16). In results, Spirometric and maximal ex-ercise variables in the initial evaluation were significantly reduced in group 1 (p < 0.05) but medication and clinical scores and the occur-rence of exercise induced bronchospasm (EIB) did not differ between the two groups. Aerobic improvement with training (maximal oxygen uptake and/or anaerobic threshold increment > 10% and 100 ml) was inversely related to the baseline level of fitness and was independent of disease severity. Although the clinical score and the occurrence of EIB did not change after training, aerobic improvement was associated with a significant reduction in the medication score and the daily use of both inhaled and oral steroids (p < 0.05). In conclusion, results show that the less fit asthmatic children were able to normalize their aerobic fitness with a super-vised training programme without clinical com-plications. Interestingly, I found a significant association between aerobic improvement and reduction in use of both inhaled and oral ster-oids.