Variability and short-term determinants of walking capacity in patients with intermittent claudication

Abstract

A wide short-term variability of WDBS exists and likely contributes to the difficulties experienced by patients with IC to estimate their maximal walking distance at leisurely pace. Incomplete recovery from a preceding walk, as estimated through PSD, seems to dominantly account for the WDBS in patients with IC.

Self-reported estimation of usual walking speed improves the performance of questionnaires estimating walking capacity in patients with vascular-type claudication

“…22 Nevertheless, it seems that for one patient, the variability of walking speed is small both in test-retest recordings 23,24 and within a prolonged 1-hour stroll. 25 Amazingly, many studies have focused on the measurement of walking speed over various test distances, 21,[26][27][28][29][30] but to the best of our knowledge, only one large-scale study has ever estimated the usual walking pace with a questionnaire. 26 Adding one question to the WIQ and EACH-Q changes the initial 70 boxes to 75 boxes and 32 to 37 boxes, respectively, but does not seem to result in more missing values.…”

“…Second, we did not study the correlation of the speed-item answer with other measures of walking speed as could be attained with a 4-meter walking velocity test 29,32 or with the GPS technique. 13,25 Such analyses have to be performed and might provide results slightly different from those observed over 10 meters. Third, we did not account for the patient's level of education or for socioeconomic issues.…”

The Inter- and Intra-Unit Variability of a Low-Cost GPS Data Logger/Receiver to Study Human Outdoor Walking in View of Health and Clinical Studies

“…GPS has been recently used to study functional limitations in patients with chronic diseases such as multiple sclerosis [2], peripheral artery disease [3], [4] and spine surgery [5], [6]. These studies show that the potential uses of the GPS technique for health and clinical applications are diverse, interesting and promising.…”

Clinical Interest of Ambulatory Assessment of Physical Activity and Walking Capacity in Peripheral Artery Disease

“…Authors stated that this variability may contribute to the difficulties experienced by patients in estimating their absolute claudication distance at a usual pace, thereby contributing, at least partly, to the low concordance between estimated and measured absolute claudication distances in PAD patients (Watson et al, 1997). It was also found that in most PAD patients, the walking distances between two stops induced by lower limb pain were inversely related to the duration of the stop that preceded each walking bout (Le Faucheur et al, 2010). This suggests that the early restart of walking, after pain relief, leads to shortened walking distance, most likely because of incomplete ischemic recovery from the preceding walk.…”

“…As specified in Appendix 2 (Supporting Information Appendix S2), when assessing GPS outdoor walking capacity in PAD patients, some authors have used the total walking distance measured during a 40-min outdoor walk (Nordanstig et al, 2014a(Nordanstig et al, , 2014b, whereas others have used the highest measured distance between two stops (Le Faucheur et al, 2008Faucheur et al, , 2010Tew et al, 2013). The difference in the outcome measures computed seems to be a direct consequence of the GPS analysis methodology used.…”