Impact of cardiac rehabilitation and exercise training programs in coronary heart disease

Cardiovascular rehabilitation (CR) is the process of developing and maintaining an optimal level of physical, social, and psychological well-being in order to promote recovery from cardiovascular (CV) illness. It is a multi-disciplinary approach encompassing supervised exercise training, patient counseling, education and nutritional guidance that may also enhance quality of life. Beneficial CV effects may include improving coronary heart disease risk factors; particularly exercise capacity, reversing cardiac remodeling, and favorably modifying metabolism and systemic oxygen transport. We review the historical basis for contemporary CR, the indications and critical components of CR, as well as the potential salutary physiological and clinical effects of exercise-based CR

Comparing SF-36® scores versus biomarkers to predict mortality in primary cardiac prevention patients.

BACKGROUND: Risk stratification plays an important role in evaluating patients with no known cardiovascular disease (CVD). Few studies have investigated health-related quality of life questionnaires such as the Medical Outcomes Study Short Form-36 (SF-36®) as predictive tools for mortality, particularly in direct comparison with biomarkers. Our objective is to measure the relative effectiveness of SF-36® scores in predicting mortality when compared to traditional and novel biomarkers in a primary prevention population. METHODS: 7056 patients evaluated for primary cardiac prevention between January 1996 and April 2011 were included in this study. Patient characteristics included medical history, SF-36® questionnaire and a laboratory panel (total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL, LDL, ApoA, ApoB, ApoA1/ApoB ratio, homocysteine, lipoprotein (a), fibrinogen, hsCRP, uric acid and urine ACR). The primary outcome was all-cause mortality. RESULTS: A low SF-36® physical score independently predicted a 6-fold increase in death at 8years (above vs. below median Hazard Ratio [95% confidence interval] 5.99 [3.86-9.35], p CONCLUSION: The SF-36® physical score is a reliable predictor of mortality in patients without CVD, and outperformed most studied traditional and novel biomarkers. In an era of rising healthcare costs, the SF-36® questionnaire could be used as an adjunct simple and cost-effective predictor of mortality to current predictors