Effects of a 6-Week Treadmill Training With and Without Virtual Reality on Frailty in People With Multiple Sclerosis.
Tobia Zanotto, Irina Galperin, Danya Pradeep Kumar and 13 others
PMID 39341443WHAT IT FOUND
Adding virtual reality to treadmill training did not reduce frailty more than treadmill alone in people with MS.
Both groups did improve after 6 weeks. In an exploratory analysis, VR helped the cognitive component of frailty.
Key findings
01Both treadmill training groups showed a reduction in frailty after the intervention, but adding virtual reality did not produce a greater reduction than treadmill alone.
02In exploratory analyses, the virtual reality group showed a greater improvement in the cognitive component of frailty than the treadmill-only group, while both groups improved similarly on the physical component.
0342 participants (50.6%) met the threshold for a clinically meaningful reduction in frailty, while 41 (49.4%) did not.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
This is a secondary analysis of data collected for a different primary question, so the sample was not sized for the frailty outcome. There was no group that did nothing or received a sham treatment, so it is impossible to separate the effect of treadmill training from the effect of simply attending three sessions a week. Only 83 of the 124 randomized participants could be included in this analysis because of missing data on the frailty measure. The cognitive and physical sub-indices of frailty were exploratory and their content validity has not been established. All participants could walk unassisted for at least 5 minutes, so nothing here applies to non-ambulatory MS patients. Training lasted only 6 weeks; the authors note that longer durations have been linked to greater frailty improvements in older adults.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that virtual reality is superior to treadmill training for reducing frailty in MS. The primary outcome showed no difference between the two groups (P=.367), and the cognitive sub-index that favored VR was an exploratory measure whose content validity has not been established.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →