The Relationship Between Exercise and The Occurrence of Abdominal Wall Complications in Patients on Peritoneal Dialysis

Background The relationship between exercise and abdominal wall complications remains controversial in the general population and has been rarely studied in patients with peritoneal dialysis (PD). This study aims to investigate the association between exercise and abdominal wall complications in the PD population.. Methods A retrospective data analysis of a prospective cohort. Abdominal wall complications were recorded during follow-up. Exercise characteristics were collected monthly by outpatient questionnaire, including whether the patient exercised, type of exercise, exercise duration, and exercise intensity. Competing risk models were used to evaluate the predictive power of exercise variables for the occurrence of abdominal wall complications. Results Among the 475 recruited PD patients, 33 (6.9%) developed abdominal wall complications during a median follow-up of 46.0 months. A total of 377 (79.4%) patients engaged in regular exercise, with walking (99.5%) being the predominant form. Only 2 (0.5%) patients combined aerobic and resistance exercise. The median exercise duration was 210.0 minutes per week (interquartile range: 140.0–350.0 minutes). No exercise characteristics, including exercise participation, exercise duration per week, or exercise intensity, were found to be associated with abdominal wall complications in either univariate or multivariate competing risk analyses. Similarly, no significant prognostic value of exercise variables was observed in any subgroup analyses. Conclusions This study demonstrates for the first time that exercise, primarily in the form of aerobic activity with the current duration and intensity, does not increase the risk of abdominal wall complications in PD patients. Further research is needed to explore the effects of high-intensity aerobic exercise and resistance training in the PD population. This study did not involve any interventions, and all the data were obtained from the PDTAP database. Registration number: NCT03571451 , Registration date: 2018-06-20