The physical condition and walking ability of children with spina bifida improves with training on a running machine. This has been concluded by Janke de Groot who is a teacher and researcher at the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. She will be awarded her doctorate on December 17, 2010 by the University Medical Center (UMC) Utrecht.
In her doctoral research, Janke de Groot studied two groups of children with spina bifida between the ages of six and sixteen years. The children in the treatment group were trained in walking on a treadmill at home twice a week for twelve weeks. De Groot compared the walking ability of these children before and after the training program with children from a control group. Thanks to the physical training on the treadmill, the children were able to walk further and their physical condition also improved. After the training, they were able to walk about half a kilometer per hour quicker than before the exercise program. After three months the children’s walking ability still showed improvement but their level of fitness returned to its previous level.
“Half a kilometer per hour can make a difference”, says de Groot. “For example, the children can cross over the road just that little bit quicker in order to play with friends or walk to school. In this respect, our results answer an often heard plea for help from parents. They want their child to continue to walk as well as possible. However stable the child's condition is, their walking ability often deteriorates over time. I think that treadmill training could become an important component of the physical therapy treatment for these children.”
Children with spina bifida have less muscle power and are not as fit as others; this means that they do not walk a lot and are less active. As a consequence, their physical fitness gets worse creating a vicious circle. Each year, about a hundred children are born with spina bifida in the Netherlands. Some of these children are wheelchair bound but others are able to walk.
Janke de Groot is a physiotherapist and researcher at the Innovation Centre for Healthcare at Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. De Groot conducted her research at the Department of Pediatric Physiotherapy in the Wilhelmina Children's Hospital (WKZ) in collaboration with the Department of Pediatric Neurology at UMC Utrecht. This research was partly funded by the Dutch Stichting BIO-kinderrevalidatie.