Effect of Baduanjin on pulmonary rehablitation in patients with moderate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: a multi-center randomized controlled trial (Preprint)
BACKGROUND Baduanjin has been applied in health and rehabilitation and gained a growing number of practitioners both in home and abroad.To explore the effect of home based and video guided PR training, our research determined to evaluate Baduanjin on moderate COPD patients and explore its synergy effect with IMT in inducing improvement in pulmonary function, exercise capacity and quality of life. OBJECTIVE We cooperated Baduanjin as a pulmonary rehabilitation intervention for patients with moderate COPD. We evaluated its efficiency on pulmonary function, exercise capacity, quality of life in moderate COPD patients. METHODS This was a multi-centered, prospective, randomized controlled trial. Moderate COPD patients were collected from ten hospitals in Shanghai. After a two-week run-in period, all eligible participants were randomly assigned into Baduanjin training group, Tri-Ball® Respiratory training group, Baduanjin combined with respiratory training group and control group. The outcome assessments were conducted at four time points, namely at the 4th week and 8th week during the intervention, after 12-week pulmonary rehabilitation program and 3-month follow up. RESULTS A total of 240 participants were recruited in this study. 217 moderate COPD patients were analyzed in this study. After 12-week PR intervention, improvement was noticed in pulmonary function (FEV1%), exercise capacity (6MWD) and quality of life (CAT, SGRQ and T.C.M score) in Baduanjin training group when compared to the control group (P<0.05). Combining Baduanjin with additional inspiratory muscle training exerted better result than Banduanjin or inrespiratory muscle training alone (P<0.05). Improved performances after 12-week PR intervention were maintained after 3-month follow up in this research. Compared with the control group, drastically more percentage of participants with mMRC≤2 in combination training group was observed (mMRC≤2, 55(100%) vs 44(83.02%); mMRC>2, 0(0%) vs 9 (16.98%), P<0.01). CONCLUSIONS The results of this trial suggested that, Baduanjin training, as a simple daily pulmonary rehabilitation maneuver, could prevent the deterioration of pulmonary function in COPD patients and associated with improvement in exercise capacity and quality of life. CLINICALTRIAL The study protocol has been registered with the Clinical Trial Registry (NCT03892629).