Abstract
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is a severe ongoing global emergency. Despite high rates of asymptomatic patients, in many cases, the infection causes a rapid decline in pulmonary function due to an acute respiratory distress-like syndrome, leading to multi-organ failure and death. To date, recommendations about rehabilitation on COVID-19 are based on clinical data derived from other similar lung diseases. Rehabilitation literature lacks a standard taxonomy, limiting a proper evaluation of the most effective treatments for patients after COVID-19 infection. In this study, we assessed the clinical and rehabilitative associations and the geographical area involved in interstitial lung diseases (ILD) and in COVID-19, by a mathematical analysis based on graph theory. We performed a quantitative analysis of the literature in terms of lexical analysis and on how words are connected to each other. Despite a large difference in timeframe (throughout the last 23 years for ILD and in the last 1.5 years for COVID-19), the numbers of papers included in this study were similar. Our results show a clear discrepancy between rehabilitation proposed for COVID-19 and ILD. In ILD, the term “rehabilitation” and other related words such as “exercise” and “program” resulted in lower values of centrality and higher values of eccentricity, meaning relatively less importance of the training during the process of care in rehabilitation of patients with ILD. Conversely, “rehabilitation” was one of the most cited terms in COVID-19 literature, strongly associated with terms such as “exercise”, “physical”, and “program”, entailing a multidimensional approach of the rehabilitation for these patients. This could also be due to the widespread studies conducted on rehabilitation on COVID-19, with Chinese and Italian researchers more involved. The assessment of the terms used for the description of the rehabilitation may help to program shared rehabilitation knowledge and avoid literature misunderstandings.
Highlights
The novel pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by Severe AcuteRespiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), originated in 2019 in Wuhan and subsequently spread worldwide
We aimed to provide useful information to understand the evidence of literature and the connection between the main words used in the rehabilitation scientific literature for these diseases
We used the LENGTH method, which is a quantitative mathematical analysis based on graph theory, focused on the scientific literature lexicon
Summary
The novel pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by Severe AcuteRespiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), originated in 2019 in Wuhan and subsequently spread worldwide. The emerging awareness of the consequences of COVID-19 disease has allowed rehabilitation to assume an increasingly important role For this reason, research about COVID-19 rehabilitation has seen a rapid growth, most of the studies were based on experiences in acute care settings or provided only general recommendations [4,5,6,7,8]. Research about COVID-19 rehabilitation has seen a rapid growth, most of the studies were based on experiences in acute care settings or provided only general recommendations [4,5,6,7,8] These studies have been useful in planning the early rehabilitation treatments during the acute phase of the pandemic
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