Dr Danielle Kirkman Explains How Exercise Testing in Patients With CKD Can Improve Care

Because exercise capacity is known to be linked with several key outcome measures in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD), routine exercise testing can help clinicians prescribe individualized exercise interventions, said Danielle Kirkman, PhD, assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Transcript

How can exercise testing be used to predict and change future health outcomes in CKD?

There’s a lot of evidence out there to suggest that exercise capacity and physical activity levels in kidney disease patients are strongly linked with hard outcome measures such as mortality, hospitalization, and quality of life. So I think it’s really important that we perform routine exercise testing with our kidney disease patients in order to try and catch any declines in physical capacity earlier. This could be testing using just normal physical function testing batteries, such as the 6-minute walk, the 30-second sit to stand test, or more gold standard measures such as cardiopulmonary exercise testing.

I think the cardiopulmonary exercise testing provides some novel insights into exactly what systems may be contributing to reduced exercise capacity, and if we know that we can really prescribe exercise interventions that target where the limitations are, providing more individual-based therapies for these patients.