A study of health-promoting behaviors as comprehensive as this one provides a great deal of information about the lives of women with MS at a glance. This information could be invaluable for exercise physiologists. These professionals might not be qualified to counsel on health-promoting behaviors such as nutrition and spirituality, but this information (in addition to conversations with clients) helps place the lives of women with MS into a larger context and reminds exercise professionals to continue asking clients questions such as, "Did you eat breakfast?" (For this item, placed under the nutrition subscale, 31% of the relapsing-remitting and 37% of the chronic progressive respondents reported skipping this important meal. Certainly that could affect an exercise session.)

In the literature review of this study, the authors cited a previous study about patients' perceptions of the care they receive. Of the 532 people with MS interviewed (77% women), 86% wanted much more information about positive health-promoting behaviors such as exercise and nutrition than they were receiving from physicians. The traditional medical model of care that does not include preventive health measures is not working for people with MS. This is where the exercise professional and the exercise setting can really make a difference through referrals, placement of posters, and other collateral materials outlining other avenues for positive health-promoting behaviors.

This study clearly shows that more exercise barrier research is needed if the demand for exercise programs is high, but exercise participation is low and does not increase over time as suggested by the data. Further research must also address increasing the diversity of subject pools, perhaps by taking a hard look at how regional and national organizations reach out to people with disabling conditions and subsequently refer subjects to research studies. Future research, the authors noted, should also work toward reconciling the differences that might exist between self-reports of functional limitations and performance-based measures of the same. The former, if not quite reflecting reality, must not be discounted because these reports indicate the extent to which an individual perceives he/she is impaired. Continued work must also be done to tailor exercise programs to chronic progressive clients with MS who are more likely to need greater assistance and adaptation to exercise than the relapsing-remitting population.