Accelerometer assessment of physical activity in individuals with paraplegia who do and do not participate in physical exercise.

OBJECTIVE

Our main goal was to measure physical activity (PA) in people with paraplegia. Secondarily, we aimed to establish the relationship between being engaged in physical exercise (PE) and reaching the recommended moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) level. We further analyzed the effect of being engaged in PE on the PA levels.

DESIGN

Descriptive cross-sectional.

SETTING

Spanish associations for individuals with spinal cord injury.

PARTICIPANTS

Ninety-six manual wheelchair users with chronic paraplegia.

INTERVENTIONS

Participants wore a wrist accelerometer for one week.

OUTCOME MEASURES

Levels of PA and sedentary behavior. In addition, participants were classified into two groups, exercisers (EG) and non-exercisers (NEG) to analyze the effect of PE enrollment on the variables.

RESULTS

For all participants, a mean (SD) of 5,341.70 (966.4) minutes per week were spent engaged in sedentary behaviors, 2,188.99 (723.9) minutes were spent engaged in light activity, and 206.24 (180.0) minutes were spent engaged in MVPA. There was a significant relationship between PE and reaching the minimum levels of MVPA recommended [ (1) = 25.03,  < 0.01]. NEG showed a greater number of minutes per week for sedentary behavior [ (94) = 2.50,  < 0.05,  = 0.25]. The EG spent more than twice as much time doing MVPA than the NEG (263.8 min vs 114.3 min, respectively).

CONCLUSIONS

MVPA levels are low in manual wheelchair users who are not regular exercisers, but most of those who self-reported being regular exercisers reach the minimum levels recommended for health benefits. Sedentary behavior is a concern in this population.