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 All 96 study participants had rheumatoid arthritis, an immune system
disorder that causes debilitating swelling and pain in the joints.
Researchers randomly assigned patients to get a pedometer with or
without a daily step goal, or to get only educational brochures with
advice on becoming more active.
After 21 weeks, all of people with pedometers were walking more on
average each day: 1,441 additional steps without a step goal and
1,656 extra steps with a goal. But the patients who didn’t get
pedometers actually got 747 fewer steps a day on average by the end
of the study.
Patients with pedometers reported statistically meaningful declines
in fatigue during the study, but people who only got education did
not.
“We found that increasing activity just through walking decreased
fatigue,” said lead study author Dr. Patricia Katz of the University
of California, San Francisco.
“Most of us probably don’t realize how inactive we are until we
start measuring our daily activity,” Katz said by email. “Having a
concrete goal, such as the number of daily steps, seems to help
people become and stay active.”
Every patient received the same educational brochure at the start.
In the two groups that received pedometers, all of the participants
were asked to keep a daily diary to record how many steps they
logged.
For one group with pedometers, researchers also assessed their
activity levels at the start of the study and set goals for them to
increase their average daily steps by 10 percent every two weeks.
At the start of the study, participants were 54 years old on average
and were typically getting about 4,891 steps a day, which
researchers classified as sedentary. Very few of them were getting
at least 8,000 steps a day, which the researchers say is a healthy
activity level.
Beyond its small size, another limitation of the study is that
researchers lacked data on how often participants wore the devices,
which makes it difficult to get an accurate daily step count, the
authors note in Arthritis Care and Research.
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It’s also possible that the pedometer groups might not have improved
as much if they hadn’t also been recording their steps in a daily
diary, which increases their engagement with the effort to be more
active, said Dr. Mitesh Patel, a researcher at the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who wasn’t involved in the study.
“Research indicates that for most people, pedometers and wearable
devices are more likely to help change health behaviors if they are
combined with an engagement strategy,” Patel said by email.
Generally, pedometers are most useful for people who are sedentary
and unaware of their own level of inactivity, said Dr. Lucas Carr, a
physiology researcher at the University of Iowa who wasn’t involved
in the study.
“This relatively simple intervention helped a very sedentary group
of rheumatoid arthritis patients increase their activity at a level
that is considered clinically significant,” Carr said by email. “The
largest health benefits are realized when an individual changes from
doing nothing to doing something.”
While the study included only people with rheumatoid arthritis, it’s
possible pedometers might be useful for people with other chronic
medical problems, said Dr. David Geier, an orthopedic surgeon sports
medicine specialist in Charleston, South Carolina who wasn’t
involved in the study.
“It seems reasonable to think they could help stimulate activity,”
Geier said by email. “Physical activity would be helpful for almost
everyone.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2oHjzBn Arthritis Care and Research, online
April 5, 2017.
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