Aspects related to physical capacity limitations in post-COVID-19 patients.
Post-Covid-19, physical capacity, physical performance test, exercise test.
COVID-19 is an infectious disease that causes different systemic manifestations during the acute phase and which in many patients can lead to the severe acute respiratory syndrome. In the post-acute period or post-COVID-19, it is known that some patients may evolve with reduced exercise capacity and quality of life. During the pandemic between the years 2020-2022, much has been studied about the consequences of these manifestations in the cardiopulmonary system and skeletal muscle involved from the functional limitation, as to the best way to identify and plan the intervention in these patients. Assessment of exercise capacity is essential to identify functional deterioration and plan the rehabilitation process in post-COVID-19 survivors. Thus, the general objective of this thesis is to investigate the aspects related to functional limitations from their forms of evaluation, performance measures, and analysis of muscle activation and fatigue, in addition to the identification in the literature of the psychometric properties of the exercise tests used in patients at the moment post-Covid-19. Methods: This thesis was divided into two parts. The first part 1) is a systematic review of the psychometric properties (validity, reliability [internal consistency and measurement error], learning effects, retesting, familiarity, responsiveness, and interpretability) of exercise tests in post-COVID-19 patients. 19; where randomized controlled trials, randomized controlled trials (RCTs), quasi-RTCs, and observational studies will be included. The second part, 2) is a cross-sectional study carried out with adult patients who were diagnosed with COVID-19, whether or not admitted to hospital, of both sexes, compared to a control group and evaluated non-invasively, using surface electromyography (EMGs) during the 1-min sit-and-stand functional test (1-STS). Preliminary results: The systematic review protocol was finalized, and the search for studies will be carried out in October 2022. The cross-sectional study was approved by the Ethics and Research Committee of the Hospital Universitário Onofre Lopes-HUOL/UFRN, under Opinion No. 4,172,356. The collections were carried out from September 2020 to November 2021, and 36 post-COVID-19 patients and 11 volunteers from the control group were evaluated.
Conclusions: It is expected to provide evidence of obtaining psychometric characteristics of physical performance tests in the post-Covid-19 and support the indication of physical performance characteristics and adaptation of these patients to exercise. In addition, the effects of COVID-19 on exercise capacity, are given by muscle electrical activity. In this way, this thesis can be consolidated the relevance in the development of standardized protocols for guidance and exercise prescription during the rehabilitation of this population.