Context Effects in Exercise Therapy for Knee and/or Hip Pain (CONEX)

University of Southern Denmark (SDU)

Status: Completed

Conditions: Osteoarthritis, Hip; Hip Pain; Joint Pain; Osteoarthritis, Knee; Knee Pain

Treatments: Other: Contextually enhanced physical surroundings of exercise; Other: Neuromuscular exercise

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT02043613

S-20130130

Details and patient eligibility

About

The study is designed to investigate the effect of physical surroundings on the effect of exercise therapy for knee and hip pain.

Full description

Context effect have been shown to be influential in health-care settings, such as hospitals. This study investigates if context effects can be caused by the physical surroundings of exercise.

The study is designed as a double-blind randomized controlled clinical trial. Patients with knee and/or hip pain with a duration of a least 3 months are included in the trial and randomly assigned to 3 groups.

1. Exercise in pre-existing, standard room
2. Exercise in contextually enhanced room.
3. Waiting list.

The intervention consists markedly different between the two exercise rooms. The physical surroundings are described by factors such as acoustics, light source and intensity, decorations and air quality.

The exercise program applied is based on a previously investigated neuromuscular exercise program, NEMEX. The same program is performed in both exercise rooms. Consequently, only the physical surroundings differ between intervention groups.

Patients' "global perceived effect" is used as the primary outcome assessed at 8 weeks follow-up.

Enrollment: 103 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 35+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Age: 35 years or older
• Self-report of knee and/or hip pain within the last 3 months.
• Willing and able to attend exercise therapy at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense M twice weekly.

Exclusion criteria

• Co-morbidities or contraindication prohibiting to participation in exercise therapy.
• Unable to fill-out questionnaires, or to speak, read or understand Danish.
• Already participating in exercise therapy*, having had surgery to the hip/knee within the last 3 months or on waiting list for joint surgery within the coming 6 months. (*defined as supervised exercise program by physiotherapist, systematic strength training etc. with duration of 6 weeks or more)

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

---

103 participants in 3 patient groups

Exercise in standard room

Active Comparator group

Description:

Intervention: Exercise Patients exercise in standard physical surroundings. The room is marked by years of use. The room is placed in the basement, has artificial lighting, poor acoustics and bare concrete walls.

Treatment:

Other: Neuromuscular exercise

Exercise in a contexually enhanced room

Experimental group

Description:

Intervention: Exercise + contextually enhanced physical surroundings Patients exercise in a contextually enhanced room. The room has both artificial lighting and daylight, view of a recreational park, better acoustics, decorations among other factors, which may cause or enhance the context effect.

Treatment:

Other: Neuromuscular exercise

Other: Contextually enhanced physical surroundings of exercise

Waiting list

No Intervention group

Description:

Patients on waiting list are included, baseline tested and placed on a waiting-list for a 8 week period and tested at 8 weeks follow-up. The group is representative of the natural cause of disease.