Increasing daily duration of rehabilitation for inpatients with sporadic inclusion body myositis may contribute to improvement in activities of daily living: A nationwide database cohort study.

The study is observational, not randomized, so it cannot prove that longer rehabilitation caused the improvement; patients who received more therapy may have had different unmeasured characteristics. The database did not contain details on the specific types of rehabilitation provided (e.g., strength vs. balance training), so clinicians do not know what content drove the results. The definition of 'improvement' in the Barthel Index was set at a single point, which may not represent a clinically meaningful change for patients. The longer rehabilitation group had a longer hospital stay, which could have contributed to the observed ADL gains independently of the daily therapy intensity. Diagnosis of sIBM was based on administrative codes without validation, raising the possibility of misclassification.

The authors declared no conflicts of interest.

Do not assume that simply adding more hours of any type of therapy will guarantee better outcomes. The study did not specify the content of the rehabilitation, and the longer therapy group also stayed in the hospital longer, which may have influenced the results. Additionally, robotic rehabilitation was associated with reduced benefits when combined with longer daily durations, possibly due to setup time consuming active therapy minutes.