Reliability and validity of the ultrasound technique to measure the rectus femoris muscle diameter in older CAD-patients

BMC Medical Imaging

Research Article

Luc Vanhees¹  Tom Thomaes¹  Steven Onkelinx¹  Véronique Cornelissen¹  Martine Thomis²  Walter Coudyzer³ 

[1] Cardiovascular Rehabilitation Unit, Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tervuursevest 101, 3001, Heverlee, Belgium;Exercise and Health Research Group, Department of Kinesiology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Tervuursevest 101, 3001, Heverlee, Belgium;Radiology, University Hospital Leuven, Herestraat 49, 3000, Leuven, Belgium;

关键词: Cardiac Rehabilitation;    Coronary Artery Disease;    Ultrasound Imaging;    CT scan;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2342-12-7

 received in 2011-08-01, accepted in 2012-04-02,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe increasing age of coronary artery disease (CAD) patients and the occurrence of sarcopenia in the elderly population accompanied by 'fear of moving' and hospitalization in these patients often results in a substantial loss of skeletal muscle mass and muscle strength. Cardiac rehabilitation can improve exercise tolerance and muscle strength in CAD patients but less data describe eventual morphological muscular changes possibly by more difficult access to imaging techniques. Therefore the aim of this study is to assess and quantify the reliability and validity of an easy applicable method, the ultrasound (US) technique, to measure the diameter of rectus femoris muscle in comparison to the muscle dimensions measured with CT scans.Methods45 older CAD patients without cardiac event during the last 9 months were included in this study. 25 patients were tested twice with ultrasound with a two day interval to assess test-retest reliability and 20 patients were tested twice (once with US and once with CT) on the same day to assess the validity of the US technique compared to CT as the gold standard. Isometric and isokinetic muscle testing was performed to test potential zero-order correlations between muscle diameter, muscle volume and muscle force.ResultsAn intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) of 0.97 ((95%CL: 0.92 - 0.99) was found for the test-retest reliability of US and the ICC computed between US and CT was 0.92 (95%CL: 0.81 - 0.97). The absolute difference between both techniques was 0.01 ± 0.12 cm (p = 0.66) resulting in a typical percentage error of 4.4%. Significant zero-order correlations were found between local muscle volume and muscle diameter assessed with CT (r = 0.67, p = 0.001) and assessed with US (r = 0.49, p < 0.05). Muscle strength parameters were also significantly correlated with muscle diameter assessed with both techniques (range r = 0.45-r = 0.61, p < 0.05).ConclusionsUltrasound imaging can be used as a valid and reliable measurement tool to assess the rectus femoris muscle diameter in older CAD patients.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Thomaes et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.