Clinical Effects of Exercise Combined with Respiratory Training in the Rehabilitation Treatment of Patients with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of exercise and respiratory training for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients on specific COPD-related outcomes, such as lung function, exercise capacity, and patient prognosis.

Methods: This work had a retrospective design. The subjects of this study were 90 patients with COPD who were treated in our hospital from May 2020 to May 2021. The patients were divided into two groups according to whether they performed exercise combined with respiratory training based on conventional treatment. After two weeks of intervention, the difference in rehabilitation outcomes between the two groups was detected at the first and third months after discharge.

Results: The rehabilitation compliance of the observation group was significantly higher than that of the control group (95.56% vs. 77.78%, P < .05). The forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) (2.66±0.71 vs. 2.28±0.48, P = .004), forced vital capacity (FVC) (3.30±0.70 vs. 3.00±0.63, P = .035), FEV1/FVC (80.61±8.01% vs. 76.77±7.34%, P = .020), maximal ventilation volume per minute (MVV) (96.14±3.50 vs. 91.20±4.97, P < .001), partial pressure of blood oxygen (PaO2) (89.52±6.87 vs. 82.65±6.54, P < .001), and oxygen saturation of blood (SaO2) (98.05±1.27 vs. 95.90±1.42, P < .001) in the observation group were significantly higher than those in the control group. In contrast, arterial partial pressure of carbon dioxide (PaCO2) (39.52±1.66 vs. 43.21±2.01, P < .001) was significantly lower than that in the control group. The observation group's 6-minute walking distance (6MWD) (401.05±65.66 vs. 360.25±54.94, P = .002) after treatment was significantly longer than those of the control group. The acute exacerbation rate (6.67% vs. 20.00%, P = .036), rehospitalization rate (4.44% vs. 17.78%, P = .044), and mortality rate (0.00% vs. 8.89%, P = .041) of the observation group were lower than those of the control group.

Conclusion: The application of exercise training combined with respiratory training in the rehabilitation treatment of COPD patients can more effectively promote the improvement of lung function, blood gas indexes, exercise endurance, and respiratory function and can improve the symptoms of dyspnea, with a good prognosis. This study confirmed the additional health benefits of exercise/respiratory training for COPD patients and provides evidence for the application of exercise/respiratory training in clinical practice. Therefore, it is recommended that in clinical practice, the necessity of exercise/respiratory training in COPD patients needs to be considered. However, the duration of intervention and follow-up period in this study were short, and longer intervention and follow-up are still needed to further confirm the results of this study.