Application of cardiopulmonary exercise testing in the assessment of cardiopulmonary functional changes in lung cancer patients before and after radiotherapy

Objective To investigate the value of cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPET) in the cardiopulmonary functional assessment of lung cancer patients before and after radiotherapy.Methods Lung cancer patients who were to undergo radiotherapy in the radiotherapy department of Xuzhou Central Hospital from July 2020 to December 2022 were included, and CPET (including static lung function) were performed one day before and one week after radiotherapy. The core indexes, circulatory indexes, respiratory indexes and static lung function indexes in the resting phase, warm-up phase, anaerobic threshold phase, limiting phase and recovery 3 min phase were derived from the test system. The results of data analysis were used to assess the overall functional changes of lung cancer patients before and after radiotherapy.Results A total of 45 patients with lung cancer were enrolled. After radiotherapy, among the core indexes, the anaerobic threshold as a percentage of predicted value (AT%pred), and peak oxygen pulse were lower (P