Efficacy of pulmonary rehabilitation in severe and critical-ill COVID-19 patients: a controlled study

Severe and critical ill COVID-19 patients frequently need acute care hospitalization including mechanical ventilation at ICU due to acute respiratory distress. A high proportion of these patients will develop ICU-acquired weakness and a need for rehabilitation. However data on rehabilitation outcomes in these patients are scarce and the efficacy of rehabilitation remains essentially unclear. We therefore compared the rehabilitation outcomes between COVID-19 patients with pneumonia and other patients with common pneumonia to assess their rehabilitation efficacies.

We retrospectively compared the performances of six-min walk test (6MWT), chronic respiratory questionnaire (CRQ), and functional independence measure (FIM) at the discharge from pulmonary rehabilitation between 51 Covid-19 patients and 51 patients with common pneumonia using linear regression controlled for baseline values at entrance, age, sex and cumulative Illness rating scale. Fisher exact test was applied to test whether the odd ratios (ORs) of non-improvement/improvement in 6MWT (>30-m) and CRQ (>10-point) at discharge were different between the two groups.

Covid-19 patients had similar performances at discharge in 6MWT (P-value=0.14), CRQ (P-value=0.55), and 4.2-point higher (P-value=0.004) in FIM compared to the control group. No differences in the outcomes were found between severe and critical COVID-19 patients. The OR of non-improvement/improvement in 6MWT was 0.30 (P-value=0.13) between COVID-19 and control groups; but the odd of non-improvement in CRQ tended to be 3.02 times higher (P-value =0.075) in COVID-19 group.

In-house rehabilitation is effective and suitable for COVID-19 patients irrespective from disease severity. The discrepancy of high physical improvement and relatively low gains of disease related quality of life compared to control patients with common pneumonia is however remarkable. Further studies need to evaluate whether this discrepancy is an indicator of chronic disease development.