Exercise intolerance

Exercise Intolerance is a medical term used to describe a condition where the patient who is unable to do physical exercise at the level that would be expected of someone in his or her general physical condition, or who experiences unusually severe post-exercise pain, fatigue, or other negative effects. Exercise intolerance is not a disease or syndrome in and of itself, but a symptom.

Since there are many possible specific reasons why exercise could be inhibited, this is a rather slippery term. For instance, the patient may experience unusual breathlessness (dyspnea), muscle pain (myalgia), or increasing muscle weaknesswhile exercising, or may, after exercise, experience severe headache, nausea, or extreme fatigue. In most cases the specific reason that exercise is not tolerated is of considerable significance when trying to isolate the cause down to a specific disease.

Many diseases have exercise intolerance as one of the only symptoms, as in the case of some of the less severe metabolic myopathies. Nonspecific fatigue or pain syndromes such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgiaand Overtraining Syndrome are all collections of symptoms, one of which is likely to be exercise intolerance.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise+intolerance Wikipedia article Exercise intolerance.