
06/12/2024
This is a very personal subject for me. As someone who has Ankylosing spondylitis (AS), I have always had an intuitive sense that movement was important to my ongoing wellbeing. This research paper,"Effects of exercise therapy in axial spondyloarthritis: A systematic review, meta-analysis and meta-regression of randomized trials" by Zhang et al (2024) is so important in many ways:
1) Building the evidence base for exercise as a therapy;
2) Providing evidence as motivation and reassurance to sufferers that exercise is beneficial
3) Starts to address the strange space whereby those who exercise are deemed 'fit' in every other aspect when it is simply not the case. The best example is trying to explain why despite overwhelming fatigue an AS sufferer will still persist in exercising in some way.
This is just my opinion. For some really good science based analysis check out painscience.com -it's where I picked up this lead from! 🙏