Exercise for Multimorbid Patients in Primary Care: One Prescription for All?

Abstract

The purpose of this article was to discuss guidelines for the management of the most prevalent chronic diseases treated by primary care physicians (PCPs) in order to identify the best exercise regimen for each clinical population, and to provide preliminary guidance for primary care providers on exercise counselling in the 'real-world' context of multimorbidity. After a search of the PubMed electronic database, the 11 most prevalent conditions currently treated by PCPs were identified. The recommendations provided by recognised learned/scientific societies for the management of each disease were then examined and any recommendations involving physical activity and exercise were identified. It was found that the best exercise regimen (i.e. exercise type, intensity, duration, and frequency) was very similar across chronic diseases, which suggests that elaborating and implementing a standardised, minimum exercise guideline for multimorbid patients in primary care may be an alternative approach to time-costly individualised exercise prescriptions. Based on this finding, I propose an example of standardised, cross-disease exercise prescription, and discuss how such a prescription could be operationalised by PCPs in their routine clinical practice.