Effect of exercise rehabilitation on exercise capacity and quality of life in children with bronchial asthma: a systematic review.

Objectives: To systematically evaluate the effect of exercise rehabilitation on exercise capacity and quality of life in children with bronchial asthma.

Methods: PubMed, Cochrane Library, Web of Science, EBSCO, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Weipu Data, and Wanfang Data were searched for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) on the effect of exercise rehabilitation on children with bronchial asthma published up to February 2021. RevMan 5.3 was used to perform a Meta analysis.

Results: A total of 14 studies were included, with 990 subjects in total. The Meta analysis showed that compared with the conventional treatment group, the exercise rehabilitation group had significantly better exercise capacity (distance covered in the 6-minute walk test: =108.13, <0.01; rating of perceived effort: =-2.16, <0.001; peak power: =0.94, =0.001) and significantly higher total score of quality of life (=1.28, =0.0002), activity score (=1.38, =0.0002), symptom score (=1.02, <0.001), and emotional score (=0.86, <0.001) assessed by the Pediatric Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire.

Conclusions: Current evidence shows that exercise rehabilitation has a positive effect in improving exercise capacity and quality of life in children with bronchial asthma. Due to limited number and quality of studies included in the analysis, further research is needed.