Original articleMeasuring Muscle Strength for People With Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Retest Reliability of Hand-Held Dynamometry
Section snippets
Participants
Nine men and 4 women with COPD were recruited from a database of former pulmonary rehabilitation participants at a regional health service. Sample size estimates undertaken according to the method described by Walter et al18 indicated that 12 people would be appropriate if reliability coefficients were anticipated to be between 0.6 and 0.9, which is well within the range reported in previous investigations.10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16 People were excluded from the investigation if they had
Results
One man withdrew from the study because he was unable to complete the second testing session because of an unrelated illness. The characteristics of the remaining 12 participants are given in table 2. All but 1 participant had an extensive smoking history, and long-term oxygen therapy had been prescribed for 33% of participants. Cardiovascular problems were the most commonly reported comorbidities (n=7), followed by musculoskeletal conditions such as osteoarthritis (n=4) and osteoporosis (n=4).
Discussion
The protocol used for assessing isometric muscle strength in this study had good retest reliability, as evidenced by ICCs greater than or equal to .79. The correlation coefficients of the current study are similar to retest reliability coefficients reported in assessing the isometric strength of using hand-held dynamometers in other populations12, 15, 16 and not inconsistent with results reported with people with COPD using a Cybex dynamometer (ICC>.88).3 However, sole use of reliability
Conclusions
Hand-held dynamometry is a simple, portable, and inexpensive option for clinicians wanting to obtain measures of isometric muscle strength for people with COPD. The device showed good reliability coefficients and was suitable for measuring mean changes in muscle force generation for groups of people with COPD; therefore, it could appropriately be applied to monitoring changes in group programs. However, caution should be used when examining muscle strength for a person with COPD, because
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