Ellen De Langhe

MD, PhD, Rheumatologist with special interest in Systemic Auto-Immune Diseases, University Hospitals Leuven and KU Leuven.

[Ellen De Langhe @LangheEllen]

@Ilse_Degreef Veel sterke, Ilse ❤️‍🩹

[Ellen De Langhe @LangheEllen]

@RheumJnl Absolutely. Regular exercise helps manage common symptoms of SSc such as fatigue, joint pain and stiffness. Daily exercise, sports and hand training all have significant added value to improving patients’ quality of life.

[Ellen De Langhe @LangheEllen]

@RheumJnl It’s good for patients and healthcare professionals to know that they don’t simply have to accept another thing that deteriorates. Just because the mouth opening has become small doesn’t mean it should stay that way. It can improve with the help of exercise.

[Ellen De Langhe @LangheEllen]

@RheumJnl In the paper you can see that there were various challenges the patients described. 3 times/day for 10 mins each might not sound like a lot, but this proved to be a big time investment, was difficult to fit into other routines, and came with physical consequences.

[Ellen De Langhe @LangheEllen]

@RheumJnl Importantly, both exercising with a jaw motion device (Therabite) and mouth-stretching exercises improved maximal oral aperture, and adherence to therapy during the study was high. A big takeaway was that no patients considered it feasible to keep practicing 3 times/day.

[Ellen De Langhe @LangheEllen]

@RheumJnl Mixed methods has several advantages:
1. More ways to understand complex problems in different contexts than just qual and quant alone
2. Investigation from both the inductive and deductive perspectives
3. Combines theory generation and hypothesis testing within a single study

[Ellen De Langhe @LangheEllen]

@RheumJnl Really happy to be here to talk about this paper. With this study, we wanted to know about the outcome of the oral aperture, but also wanted to gain insight in the psychosocial aspects around the feasibility of the proposed exercise programs