Normative values in healthy adults for the 6-minute and 2-minute walk tests in Belgium and Vietnam: implications for clinical practice.
Duy Thanh Nguyen, Massimo Penta, Claire Questienne and 3 others
PMID 38501732WHAT IT FOUND
Healthy Belgian adults walked farther than healthy Vietnamese adults on both tests.
Distance fell with age and was higher in men. The 2-minute and 6-minute distances tracked closely.
Key findings
01Healthy Belgian adults walked farther than healthy Vietnamese adults on both walk tests.
02Walking distance was lower with older age and lower in females than males, with sex, age group and country acting independently.
03The distances walked on the 2-minute and 6-minute tests were strongly related in each country.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
Participants were healthy volunteers with no walking-limiting disease and no walking aid, so these values may not describe people with conditions that affect walking. The sample was convenience-based and included fewer older adults, so age-specific values in older groups are less secure. Each person did only one 2-minute and one 6-minute test with no practice trial, which may give lower distances than repeated trials. The Belgian and Vietnamese samples had different sex distributions, and physical activity levels were below those of the general population in both countries.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest. The work was supported by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique - FNRS and the Wallonia-Region.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use these values as expected performance for patients with walking-limiting disease. The participants were healthy volunteers with no neuromuscular, musculoskeletal or cardiopulmonary disease limiting walking and no walking aid.