Pre-surgery exercise-conditioning (P-SEC) in patients undergoing TKA

  • Research type

    Research Study

  • Full title

    Novel pre-surgery exercise-conditioning (P-SEC) in patients undergoing a total knee arthroplasty (TKA) surgery.

  • IRAS ID

    198930

  • Contact name

    Anna maria Risso

  • Contact email

    ARisso@qmu.ac.uk

  • Sponsor organisation

    Queen Margaret University

  • Duration of Study in the UK

    0 years, 11 months, 7 days

  • Research summary

    Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA) is one of the most common elective joint surgeries in the UK (60K/year). It is the treatment of choice for patients suffering from severe pain and functional limitation caused by osteoarthritis of the knee joint’s surfaces. Despite being a very common and successful surgery, rehabilitation following surgery, is often a tedious and long one, but is essential for recovery and with TKA, this is crucial in regaining movement, function and control. Current rehabilitation mainly focuses on post-surgery rehabilitation to increase range of motion and muscle power, and to aid in achieving a quick return to functional independence. Despite this, research has shown that patients undergoing TKA, still continue to experience reduced capacities in neuromuscular/sensorimotor responses which are required for quick knee joint reactions, stability and proprioception. Such reduced responses, have been found to track through into the post-operative stage, with limitations being sustained up to a year following surgery creating a greater risk of falls. In part, this may be due to the lack of importance given during rehabilitation following surgery, in view of time constraints within the NHS. Rehabilitative conditioning programmes used in current studies to improve the said reduced responses, have typically required and been delivered in a duration of 6-8-weeks. This has commanded a substantive logistical burden to elicit expected gains creating a gap within the literature. Clinically, the challenge has been to formulate a suitably pragmatic programme of conditioning that will accommodate the time- and cost-pressures associated with contemporary care practice while simultaneously offering efficacy when delivered prior to surgery as a pre-habilitative intervention. Hence, the proposed research focuses on investigating a novel neuromuscular-focused pre-surgery exercise-conditioning (P-SEC) programme, that delivers exercises based on sound physiological and loading principles (micro-cycling) that enable the delivery of the programme into a 1-week period with clearly defined expectations for effective dose-responses.

  • REC name

    South East Scotland REC 01

  • REC reference

    17/SS/0005

  • Date of REC Opinion

    8 Mar 2017

  • REC opinion

    Further Information Favourable Opinion