Graded Activity Therapy (GAT) is a person-centred approach to managing a person’s symptoms by using activity.
Activities are selected, adapted and graded for therapeutic purposes to promote health and well-being.
Therapy is goal-directed and uses activity analysis and graded activity to enable people to improve, evaluate, restore and/or maintain their function and well-being in self-care, work and leisure.
Activity management is described in detail on p 20 of the NICE guideline.
Does it help?
GAT was not one of the approaches tested in the PACE trial. There have been no published randomised controlled trials of GAT.
Our 2010 survey of physical rehabilitation therapies looked at GAT, graded exercise therapy (GET) and exercise on prescription. As reported in InterAction magazine, only GAT emerged as doing more good than harm, with 26.3% reporting that they were worse following therapy, while 39.4% reported an improvement.
It is important that GAT, like GET, should be delivered by a suitably trained therapist with experience in CFS/ME, under appropriate clinical supervision.
People with M.E. who wish to try GAT should ask to be referred to a specialist CFS/M.E. clinic, where this expertise exists, if at all possible. Details of clinics are available in our online directory.
Read past articles about GAT in our InterAction archive.
