The Effects of Stepping Exercise on Blood Pressure, Physical Performance, and Quality of Life in Female Older Adults with Stage 1 Hypertension: a Randomized Controlled Trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background Hypertension is a common disease, particularly in older adults. In a previous study, we found that an eight-week course of stepping exercise improved physical performance in healthy older adults as measured using the six-minute walk test (468 vs. 426 m in controls; p = .01). This study aims to further evaluate the effects of stepping exercise on blood pressure, physical performance, and quality of life in older adults with stage 1 hypertension. Methods This was a randomized, controlled trial comparing older adults with stage 1 hypertension who performed stepping exercise with controls. The stepping exercise (SE) was performed at moderate intensity three times/week over an eight-week period. Participants in the control group (CG) received verbal and written (pamphlet) lifestyle modification advice. Blood pressure at Week 8 was the primary outcome, while quality of life score and physical performance on the 6-minute walk test (6MWT), timed up and go test (TUGT), and five times sit to stand test (FTSST) were secondary outcomes. Results There were 17 female patients in each group (total of 34). After eight weeks of training, participants in the SE group showed significant improvements in systolic blood pressure (SBP; 132.0 vs. 145.1 mmHg; p<.01), diastolic blood pressure (DBP; 67.3 vs. 87.6 mmHg; p<.01), 6MWT (465.6 vs. 437.0; p<.01), TUGT (8.1 vs. 9.2 sec; p<.01), and FTSST (7.9 vs. 9.1 sec; p<.01) compared to controls. Regarding within-group comparison, participants in the SE also showed significant improvement in all outcomes from baseline, while any such outcomes in the CG were comparable from baseline (SBP: 144.1 to 145.1 mmHg; p = .23; DBP: 84.3 to 87.6 mmHg; p = .90). Conclusions The stepping exercise examined is an effective non-pharmacological intervention for blood pressure control in female older adults with stage 1 hypertension. This exercise also resulted in improvements in physical performance and quality of life.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".