Physical activity induction in ecological setting
FM, Pain, pain
Participants were asked to climb stairs at sustained pace, in the presence of a member of the research team/clinician who regularly assessed patient’s pain intensity. The objective was to obtain an increase in pain of at least 10% on the VAS by engaging patients in moderate-intensity physical activity in an ecological setting as similar as possible to those patients experience in their daily lives. In agreement with the medical team of the hospital pain consultation unit, we estimated that a 10% increase in pain following this activity would be a good indicator of the significance of this activity. An additional limit of 6 floors was added after a pre-test performed on 10 participants. We had initially judged that going up one floor at a sustained pace would be enough to achieve this objective. However, we could see that, for the first 10 participants who served as a pretest, even if they considered the exercise physically significant, we only obtained the desired increase in pain intensity for 5 of them. After discussion with the research team and the medical team, we modified the task and instructed participants to continue to climb the floors until they reported a 10% increase or until they reached the 6th floor, the last floor of the hospital. This additional limit was set in order to avoid to continue indefinitely the task with patients who were already in pain at the baseline and which was deemed as a significant effort for FM patients by the medical team. The participants therefore stopped physical activity when they reached an increase of at least 10% in their pain on the Pain Visual Analog Scale-intensity or when they had reached the sixth floor of the hospital.