The contribution of exercise testing in the prescription and outcome evaluation of exercise training in pulmonary rehabilitation.

Pulmonary rehabilitation is a comprehensive therapeutic intervention with proven efficacy in relieving symptoms and increasing exercise tolerance in patients with chronic respiratory diseases.One of the main components of a pulmonary rehabilitation program is lower limbs exercise training. There are several ways of establishing the optimal intensity of the exercise training, using the target heart rate, symptom scores, walking tests and laboratory exercise tests with or without ventilation or gas exchange measurements. Each of these methods has advantages and disadvantages.The gold standard in exercise capacity evaluation is cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) which brings a high level of objectivity in exercise tolerance evaluation and provides information on mechanisms responsible for its decline; this allows a better training prescription and a correct evaluation of rehabilitation outcomes.