Sixty-four participants were recruited to the study.

The baseline characteristics are presented in Table 1. Thirty-three participants were allocated to the experimental group and 31 to the control group. At 3 months after admission to the study, there were 24 participants in the experimental group and 26 in the control group. Figure 1 outlines the flow of participants through the trial. A qualified, registered physiotherapist and a medical doctor with three years of experience GSK J4 research buy in exercise programs, supervised all exercise sessions. In addition, the physiotherapist received further training in the specific exercise program for this study. The study was conducted at three hospitals specialising in antenatal care, which were located in

different regions of Cali, Colombia (Hospital Cañaveralejo, Centro de Salud Siloe, and Centro de Salud Melendez), with a combined throughput of 1200 pregnant women per year. Eighteen (75%) of the 24 participants in the experimental group participated in 25 or more of the 36 scheduled sessions. Group data are presented in Table 2 and individual data in Table 3 (see eAddenda for Table 3). At 3 months, the supervised aerobic exercise program improved health-related quality of life more in the experimental group than the control group in the Physical Component Summary of the questionnaire, with a between-group difference of 6 points (95% CI 2 to 11). The experimental group also improved significantly more than the control group in three of the four domains within the Physical Component Montelukast Sodium Summary: Selleckchem Vorinostat the physical function domain by 7 points (95% CI 0 to 14), the bodily pain domain by 7 points (95% CI 1 to 13) and the general health domain by 5 points (95% CI 1 to 10). The Mental Component Summary and its four domains showed no significant effect of the exercise intervention. This is the first study to assess of the effect of a supervised aerobic exercise program on health-related quality of life in nulliparous pregnant women. While the pre-intervention health status reported by the participants was similar to or better than normative data from women of reproductive age (Haas et al 1999,

Marcus et al 2003), limitations in physical and social functioning increased over the course of pregnancy. The median role physical and role emotional scores observed in our study of pregnant women were similar to other studies of patient populations with conditions such as congestive heart failure and diabetes (Smith and McFall 2005, Saavedra et al 2007). Following the 3-month exercise program, trends to improvement were seen in most domains of the health-related quality of life questionnaire, with statistically significant changes in the Physical Component Summary and several of its domains. The confidence intervals were not narrow enough to confirm that the benefits would be worth the effort of exercising for these women.