The relationship of the Six-Minute Walk Test To Maximal Oxygen Consumption Under the Assumption of Skew-Normality

Maximal Oxygen Consumption (VO2 max) is one of the most important predictors in cardio respiratory domain. The present work deals with the relationship between the six minute walk test to the maximal oxygen consumption. Pneumatologists and cardiologists are very interested in this relationship because it enables them to estimate the results of the cumbersome and expensive maximal oxygen consumption test with the otherwise inexpensive six-minute walk test (6MWT). We demonstrate that under some assumptions the lung function for a patients population has a skew-normal distribution. Using data from 61 patients we have estimated the parameters, with a maximum likelihood procedure and we have obtained a non linear predictive model.