The effect of leisure time physical activities on quality of life and clinical symptoms of pemphigus vulgaris

Pemphigus vulgaris is an autoimmune and chronic blistering mucocutaneous disease that has a negative effect on patients quality of life and also leisure sports activities are useful and uncomplicated method to improve the quality of life of both patients and healthy people as we have seen in relevant litertures. We wanted to investigate whether leisure time physical activities are effetive on quality of life and clinical symptoms of pemphigus vulgaris patients.

Present study is a randomised clinical trial and 76 patients with pemphigus vulgaris were included in the study and were randomly divided into two equal control and intervention groups. DLQI questionnaires, medical and personal demographic information were recorded by patients and PDAI index was recorded by a dermatologist at both before and after the intervention. The intervention included leisure sports activities such as walking in the park for 60 minutes for 8 weeks, three sessions per week and one day in between. Independent t-test was used to compare two quantitative samples and paired t-test was used to compare two dependent quantitative samples and their nonparametric equivalents test were used. All statistical analyzes were performed by SPSS software version 25.

Leisure sports activities improved the quality of life of patients in the intervention group compared to the control group after 8 weeks. (P-value = 0.045, 2.97 ± 5.2 vs 6.45 ± 7.5) But no significant difference was observed between the two groups in the PDAI clinical symptom severity index.

Leisure sports activities can be recommended as a useful and uncomplicated method to improve the quality of life of patients with pemphigus vulgaris, although it has no effect on the improvement of clinical symptoms in two mounths comparing between intervention group and control group. (P-value = 0.066, 1.89 ± 4.97 vs 4 ± 6) of course comparing each group to itself during the time of intervention both clinical symptoms and qulity of life are significantly improved (P-value<0.001) (P-value=0.004) resepectively.