Second, physiotherapists participating in the study were interested in fitness training and physical activity stimulation. Possibly, they (unintentionally) changed the content of the physiotherapy treatment for the control

group towards a more pro-active approach, similar to the intervention. Third, the fact that all participants were informed about the aim, relevance and content of the study (for example, increasing physical activity) and that they had to wear an activity monitor and register physical activity might have raised awareness of the importance of physical activity. The two measures of physical activity demonstrated contrasting results: there was no change for walking activity assessed with the StepWatch™, but there was a positive trend for the parent-reported physical activity assessed with the AQuAA. This might be explained by the U0126 ic50 different constructs underlying the StepWatch™ and AQuAA assessments. The StepWatch™ objectively measures real-time stride rate during daily walking activities, but does not provide information about other types of activities performed. The AQuAA covers a wide range of activities and may have captured an increase SP600125 in activities not registered by the StepWatch™. However, self-reports are prone to recall bias and

socially desired answering.31 Socially desired answering may be particularly likely to occur in the intervention group,

because they received the physical activity stimulation program. Previous studies that compared the AQuAA to accelerometry,19 or compared other objective and subjective physical activity measures in typically developing children, found low agreement between the methods, suggesting (-)-p-Bromotetramisole Oxalate that these measures are not interchangeable.32 This indicates that the assessment of physical activity remains challenging. Since changing physical activity behaviour is a complex process, evaluating the effect of this multi-component physical activity stimulation program on other outcomes may provide valuable information. Because the fitness training incorporated gross motor activities, and the home-based physiotherapy was focused on practising mobility activities in the home, we expected that mobility capacity would improve. Although no significant effects of intervention were demonstrated, the positive trend for gross motor capacity, which is a highly relevant outcome measure in this population, shows that this home-based activity approach may have potential for improving activity capacity. The 2.8-point increase in GMFM-66 scores in favour of the intervention group seems substantial, since it exceeds the minimum clinical important difference reported by Oeffinger et al33 No conclusions could be drawn about which component of the intervention was responsible for this observed positive trend.