Chronic Illness Exercise Interventions: A Meta-Analysis

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DESCRIPTION: (provided by the applicant) Nurses care for adults with diverse chronic illnesses, many of these people could benefit from increased physical activity that may not only enhance quality of life but also delay disease progression or prevent complications (Healthy People 2010). Although many primary studies have tested interventions designed to increase physical activity among chronically ill adults, their findings are unsynthesized, which seriously impedes both nursing practice and research progress. The purpose of this project is to integrate scientific knowledge about interventions to increase physical activity among chronically ill people. The project addresses these specific aims: (1) Determine the strength of the research base about interventions to increase physical activity; (2) Specify the effect of interventions on physical activity among people with chronic illness; (3) Distinguish factors that moderate the effect of interventions to increase activity. The proposed methods, which are common in meta-analysis, have been used by the research team in a preliminary synthesis of interventions to increase physical activity among aging subjects. An extremely extensive and rigorous literature search will be conducted using computerized search strategies, ancestry searches, registries and database searches, hand searches of selected journals, review of nursing and other disciplines' graduate projects, forward citation searches, examination of conference/association abstracts, and contacts with senior authors on retrieved primary studies and principal investigators of NIH funded eligible studies. Primary research reports will be reliably coded for intervention, methodological, and participant attributes that address the research aims. Analysis plans include: d-index to standardize the magnitude of effect between treatment and control groups, both unweighted and sample size weighted calculations, analyses under both fixed and random effects models, potential control for methodological moderators in subsequent analysis, and homogeneity analysis (Qt3 Qw) to detect intervention component effects. Findings will inform both nursing practice and future research. Nurses will be able to use these findings to design effective programs to assist chronically ill adults increase their physical activity. The compelling importance and broad scope of this work make funding necessary to achieve these important aims.