Standard Exercise Tolerance Procedure *
(for all patients)
Hints page

I. Why test exercise tolerance in HUMAN patients?

Many patients present exercise intolerance when calling <Your Patients Chart> and others may also show such compromise even if the symptom is not presented up front in the chart itself.

The procedure below provides users with a standardized test for exercise tolerance against which a patient may be tested and his/her results evaluated.

While the example below is run on the default web-HUMAN subject, Mr. Norm L. Subject, the exact same procedure can be applied to any human patient or experiment as a standard test.
*This sections assumes you are already familiar with exercise procedures in web-HUMAN.

II. The exercise tolerance protocol

The general protocol for the exercise tolerance procedure is shown immediately below.

Note in particular the exercise level (EXER=3.0), the turnoff time for exercise (XERMIN=60), the total time of the experiment (for 12 minutes), the time interval between readouts (1 minute) AND that <Your Patient's Chart> is called. This last <..Chart> is the crucial item to ask for.

Your View Output: variables will, of course, differ depending on which patient you have called up and how else you may have previously set them. For example, by default all Patients begin with the output variables set as below:

You can nevertheless obtain a quantifiable value for exercise tolerance by running the procedure above.

III. Quantifying exercise tolerance- establishing a baseline value

When following this procedure, all such tests, regardless of how they differ in their specific output variable tables and graphs, will at their bottom contain a readout of <Your Patient's Chart> in the format shown below.

Note in particular that the time to cessation of exercise is given (here 10 minutes).

In web-HUMAN, exercise ceases whenever the model runs up an O2 debt > 10 Liters total (O2DEBT = 10.00).

In this, our "baseline" test, 10L O2 debt is exceeded at 10 minutes.

IV. Comparing exercise tolerance among patients

To compare any particular patient's exercise tolerance to the standard of Mr. Norm L. Subject,

- simply run the same above exercise protocol on your particular patient of choice and

- compare times to cessation of exercise.

Thus we are told that Patient number 3, Billy Ray Styles , is "always tired and that he doesn't like to exercise."

We thus anticipate his exercise tolerance time (time to accumulation of 10 L O2 debt) to be less than 10 minutes in his resulting post-exercise Chart.

* Note: Case hints and analyses are based heavily on Drs. Randall and Coleman's HUMAN-80 Instructor's Manual supplemented by notes of Dr. Coleman's in the model code itself and findings by myself and other colleagues over our years of use of these cases.