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Clinician Article

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The effects of Pilates exercise training on physical fitness and wellbeing in the elderly: A systematic review for future exercise prescription.

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• Bullo V
• Bergamin M
• Gobbo S
• Sieverdes JC
• Zaccaria M
• Neunhaeuserer D, et al.

Read abstract Read evidence summary

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Clinical Comments

Family Medicine (FM)/General Practice (GP)

This systematic review identifies large effect sizes of the studied intervention on multiple patient-oriented and intermediate outcomes. The review's implications are somewhat limited by its non-specific health state inclusion criteria; it is difficult to distinguish the intervention's effectiveness among different sub-populations such as healthy senior citizens versus patients with Parkinson's or other chronic diseases.

General Internal Medicine-Primary Care(US)

This is a helpful study as it provided objective and subjective studies, as well as effect sizes.

Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

This article is very interesting on the surface, but less interesting as I read the methodology. The authors included 4 non-RCTs in their final list of included studies. Worse yet, only 4 of the 10 included studies could be considered "high quality"...yet the authors did not seem to give more weight to the results of the higher quality studies. The was a wide variation in the frequency and duration of the exercise interventions, yet the authors pooled the data from all these heterogenous trials and did meta-analyses. Despite these limitations, it is important for rehab specialists to see this compilation of evidence about Pilates exercise for older adults.

Public Health

This systematic review has concluded that Pilates exercise training should be taken into account as a way to improve quality of life in the elderly, due to the imparted benefits of fall prevention, physical fitness, and mood states. The meta-analysis included only studies published in English and ignored studies published in other languages. 95% of Confidence intervals of strength and dynamic balance outcomes overlap unity. The study included only 6 RCTs.