Efficacy of Conventional Rehabilitation, Transcutaneous Electro Nerve Stimulation or Early Mobilization to Reverse the Acquired Weakness of the Intensive Care Unit: Single Blind Controlled Clinical Trial

Study hypothesis: the time to revert the intensive care unit acquired weakness is less when applying an early mobilization protocol or transcutaneous electro-nervous stimulation compared with the usual or standard rehabilitative treatment.

Ethical considerations: The research protocol was presented and approved by both the Ethics Committee and the Teaching and Research Committee of our institution. The informed consent of each subject included in the study was obtained.

Sample size and study power: a sample size was defined in 18 subjects (6 subjects per intervention group). The estimation of the sample was calculated for a one-way ANOVA where a minimum difference of 2 sessions was established between the treatments, assuming a standard deviation of 1.8 sessions, an alpha error of 5% and a power of 80%.

Statistical methods: the numerical variables will be presented as mean and standard deviation or median and interquartile range according to the presented distribution. The categorical variables will be presented by frequency and percentage.

For the comparison of continuous variables, Student's t test for independent samples or the Mann-Whitney U test will be used according to the presented distribution and for the categorical variables the Chi² test or the Fisher exact test will be used according to the conformation of the crossed table. The Shapiro-Wilk test will be used to evaluate whether the distribution presented by the numerical variables fits a normal distribution. Equality of variances was assessed by the Levene´s test.