One-Minute Sit-to-Stand Test Tracks Functional Status in Parkinson’s Disease
The one-minute sit-to-stand test is moving closer to the clinic as a practical marker of function in Parkinson’s disease. In a 28-person cohort, the brief bedside task aligned with walking capacity and disease stage while also producing highly stable repeat results across a 7-day interval.
The appeal of the test is easy to understand at the point of care. Parkinson’s disease affects more than gait and tremor; it erodes the transitional movements that patients use dozens of times a day, from rising from a chair to regaining balance after a shift in posture. A test that compresses lower-limb strength, postural control, coordination, neuromuscular timing, and functional endurance into a single minute has obvious clinical logic. In patients whose mobility is progressively constrained by bradykinesia, rigidity, and postural instability, a simple repeated-stands task may reveal the practical burden of disease better than a detached laboratory measure.
The study examined whether the 1STS could perform two jobs at once: measure what it is supposed to measure and do so consistently when repeated. Participants completed the test twice, separated by 7 days. Concurrent validity was assessed against the 2-Minute Walk Test and the Hoehn and Yahr stage, two measures that anchor the 1STS against walking capacity and clinical severity rather than leaving it isolated as a standalone exercise task.
Walking Capacity and Disease Stage Moved in the Expected Direction
The correlations were clinically intuitive. The 1STS showed a strong positive relationship with the 2-Minute Walk Test, with _r_ = 0.69 and p < 0.01. Patients who stood up more times in one minute also tended to cover more ground in the walking test, which fits the shared physiology of lower-extremity power, balance, and endurance. A sit-to-stand task does not merely ask whether a patient can rise from a chair; it tests whether the lower body can repeatedly generate force and stabilize the trunk while transitioning under time pressure.
The association with Hoehn and Yahr stage moved in the opposite direction, as expected for a worsening neurologic disorder. The correlation was moderate and negative, _r_ = −0.58 with p < 0.01, meaning higher disease stage tracked with fewer sit-to-stand repetitions. In practical terms, more advanced Parkinsonian impairment carried a measurable penalty in a task that mirrors everyday independence. One sentence captures the bedside consequence: a slower chair rise is not a trivial inconvenience in Parkinson’s disease, because it can be the first visible sign that reserve is fading.
Repeat Testing Produced Excellent Stability
The most striking result was the test-retest performance. The intraclass correlation coefficient reached 0.94, with a 95% confidence interval of 0.86 to 0.97. For a brief performance measure, that level of stability matters because it means the test did not behave erratically from one session to the next. In a disorder where day-to-day variability can reflect fatigue, stiffness, medication timing, and motor fluctuations, a tool that remains steady over one week becomes far more attractive for routine use.
This kind of reliability makes the 1STS more than a convenient exercise drill. It suggests the task can serve as a reproducible marker of functional capacity in settings where time, equipment, and floor space are limited. Rehabilitation clinics, neurology practices, and community settings often need measures that are fast, inexpensive, and interpretable. The 1STS meets those constraints without stripping away the clinical meaning of the movement it measures. Standing repeatedly from a seated position is one of the most elemental actions in daily life, and Parkinson’s disease disrupts that action through a combination of weakness, slowed motor output, postural instability, and impaired coordination.
A Practical Metric for Lower-Limb Function in a Progressive Disorder
The physiologic value of the 1STS lies in what it integrates. Lower-extremity muscle strength is only part of the story. The task also demands anticipatory postural adjustments, efficient trunk control, coordinated sequencing, and enough endurance to sustain performance across a full minute. Those demands map closely onto the disabilities that accumulate as Parkinson’s disease advances. For that reason, a poor score may reflect more than isolated leg weakness; it can signal a broader breakdown in the motor system that affects transfers, mobility, and independence.
The authors positioned the test as potentially valid rather than definitively established, and that caution is appropriate. Validity in one cohort does not guarantee universal performance across all stages of disease, medication states, or care environments. Even so, the pattern here is coherent: a functional field test linked with a walking measure, aligned with disease severity, and reproduced with excellent reliability after one week. That combination gives clinicians a plausible tool for quick functional screening when a formal gait lab is unavailable.
Small Cohort, Early Step, and the Need for Broader Confirmation
The study was intentionally modest in scale, with 28 individuals with Parkinson’s disease. A cohort of that size can establish a signal, but it cannot settle the question of how the test behaves across the full range of patients encountered in real-world practice. Different disease stages, levels of frailty, orthopedic comorbidity, and medication timing could all alter performance. The one-minute sit-to-stand test also captures a slice of function, not the entire motor phenotype of Parkinson’s disease, so it should be interpreted alongside gait, balance, and symptom history rather than as a replacement for them.
Still, the central finding is hard to ignore: a one-minute chair-rise task produced excellent repeatability and clinically sensible correlations with walking capacity and stage of disease. In Parkinson’s disease, where small functional losses often accumulate into major restrictions in independence, a brief and reproducible measure of lower-limb performance has immediate utility. Further research will need to confirm these findings in larger samples and broader clinical settings before the 1STS can be treated as a standard functional endpoint rather than a promising candidate measure.