Effectiveness of an Endurance Exercise Programme Preceded by Ischaemic Preconditioning in Older People: a Randomised Clinical Trial

In recent decades, the proportion of people over 65 years of age is increasing rapidly, due to rising life expectancy and declining fertility rates. According to the World Health Organization, people in this age group will constitute 22% of the population by 2050, up from the current 12% (WHO, 2018). Therefore, improving quality of life (healthspan) and preventing disability has become a public health challenge (Olshansky, 2018).

In this context, physical exercise has been shown to be able to prevent sarcopenia, functional decline, the presence of chronic diseases and even mortality in this group (Izquierdo et al., 2021; Lazarus, Lord, & Harridge, 2019).

Resistance or endurance training can improve sarcopenia, reduce intramuscular fat accumulation, improve muscle function, among others. Aerobic exercise has been shown to be effective in maintaining muscle mass and strength in older adults is walking (Kubo et al., 2008). In fact, walking can also improve VO2max in older adults when intensities are above ∼40% VO2max (Nemoto, Gen-no, Masuki, Okazaki, & Nose, 2007). In addition, it has been linked to the prevention of cognitive decline (Maki et al., 2012) and improvements in quality of life (Awick et al., 2015) in older people.

A training method that could enhance the benefits of walking is ischaemic preconditioning (IPC), characterised by the application of brief periods of circulatory occlusion-reperfusion to a limb, minutes to hours prior to exercise. This type of intervention, initially used to delay/prevent cell damage in patients with myocardial infarction (Murry, Jennings, & Reimer, 1986), has recently shown beneficial effects in young people to improve physical performance in a wide variety of sports (Caru, Levesque, Lalonde, & Curnier, 2019), as well as to improve recovery from associated muscle damage (Franz et al., 2018), which is of particular interest in the adult population. In fact, the application of IPC alone for two weeks has been shown to improve walking speed and reduce fatigue in post-stroke patients (Durand et al., 2019), promising effects that could be increased when applied prior to resistance training, such as walking.

Thus, the objective of this study is to determine the effectiveness of an endurance exercise programme preceded by ischaemic preconditioning on parameters related to physical function, cognitive status and quality of life in older people. In addition, we set out to compare the acute and chronic effect of the proposed interventions.