Measurement Properties and Minimal Detectable Change of the 6-Min Step Test for Estimating Cardiorespiratory Fitness in Hospitalized Individuals After Stroke.

Participants were recruited by convenience at a single hospital, and 542 of the 646 people screened were not included, mostly because the diagnosis was unconfirmed or they could not walk. Everyone in the study could walk and step onto a 20 cm step and the group had mild limitations, so the results say nothing about your patients with more severe stroke who cannot manage a step. The order of the step and walk tests was not randomised, so learning or fatigue could have influenced the results. Oxygen consumption was not measured, so the test has not been checked against a maximal cardiopulmonary exercise test, which the authors call the gold standard. The correlation with the 6-minute walk test came with a wide confidence interval, which the authors describe as imprecise.

Funded by Brazilian government agencies: CAPES (finance code 001), FAPES (grant 13/2025) and CNPq (grant 406,375/2025-9). The last author receives a research productivity fellowship from FAPES. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Do not treat the 6-minute step test and the 6-minute walk test as interchangeable measures of the same thing. The two correlated only moderately (r = 0.5, 95% CI 0.3 to 0.7) and the authors state they should not be used interchangeably. Equally, do not read a small rise in step count as a fitness gain: changes below 21 repetitions fall inside the test's own measurement error.