| Methods |
Design: three group parallel trial
Purpose: examine the effect of exercise health counselling |
| Participants |
Patients: elderly out‐patients with chronic illnesses
Baseline comparability: yes |
| Interventions |
Placebo: sessions of disease management or prevention unrelated to physical activity and with no efforts made to modify behaviour ('attention control')
Untreated: no sessions
Experimental: sessions aiming at providing patient centred motivational, behavioural, and cognitive techniques to increase physical activity
(Co‐intervention: NS) |
| Outcomes |
Physical activity (CHAMPS questionnaire)
‐weekly frequency
‐caloric expenditure
‐estimated total minutes (estimated moderate minutes + estimated walk/bike minutes) |
| Notes |
|
| Risk of bias |
| Bias |
Authors' judgement |
Support for judgement |
| Adequate sequence generation? |
Unclear risk |
'computer‐generated' |
| Allocation concealment? |
Unclear risk |
NS |
| Blinding?
Treatment provider |
High risk |
Not described as double‐blind (attention control placebo/exercise health counselling) |
| Blinding?
Outcome assessor |
Unclear risk |
Not relevant as patient reported outcome |
| Incomplete outcome data addressed?
All outcomes |
Low risk |
Drop‐out < 15% |
| Free of selective reporting? |
Unclear risk |
No protocol available |
| Free of other bias? |
Low risk |
|
| No signs of variance inequality or skewness? |
Low risk |
No variance inequality (F‐test not statistically significant) and no skewness (1.64 standard deviations does not exceed the mean) |
| Trial size > 49? |
Low risk |
N = 80 |
| Clearly concealed allocation + trial size > 49 + drop‐out max 15% |
High risk |
Allocation not clearly concealed |
