Conclusions Exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation is effective at reducing important clinical outcomes in patients with coronary heart disease .
While our analysis was constrained by the quality of included trials and missing information about intervention components , there appears to be little differential effect of variations in exercise intervention , particularly on mortality outcomes .
Background While the clinical benefits of exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation are well established , there is extensive variation in the interventions used within these trials .
It is unknown whether variations in individual components of these exercise interventions provide different relative contributions to overall clinical outcomes .
This study aims to systematic ally examine the relationship between individual components of the exercise intervention in cardiac rehabilitation ( such as intensity and frequency ) and clinical outcomes for people with coronary heart disease .
Effects on quality of life with comprehensive rehabilitation after acute myocardial infarction.
This investigation was design ed to determine the impact of a brief period of cardiac rehabilitation , initiated within 6 weeks of acute myocardial infa rct ion ( AMI ) , on both disease-specific and generic health-related quality of life , exercise tolerance and return to work after AMI . With a stratified , parallel group design , 201 low-risk patients with evidence of depression or anxiety , or both , after AMI , were r and omized to either an 8-week program of exercise conditioning and behavioral counseling or to conventional care . Although the differences were small , significantly greater improvement was seen in rehabilitation group patients at 8 weeks in the emotions dimension of a new disease-specific , health-related Quality of Life Question naire , in their state of anxiety and in exercise tolerance . All measures of health-related quality of life in both groups improved significantly over the 12-month follow-up period . However , the 95 % confidence intervals around differences between groups at the 12-month follow-up effectively excluded sustained , clinical ly important benefits of rehabilitation in disease-specific ( limitations , -2.70 , 1.40 ; emotions , -4.86 , 1.10 , where negative values favor conventional care and positive values favor rehabilitation ) and generic health-related quality of life ( time trade-off , -0.062 , 0.052 ; quality of well-being , -0.042 , 0.035 ) or in exercise tolerance ( -38.5 , 52.1 kpm/min ) ; also , return to work was similar in the 2 groups ( relative risk , 0.93 ; confidence interval , 0.71 , 1.64 ) . ( ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS
Conclusions Exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation is effective at reducing important clinical outcomes in patients with coronary heart disease .
While our analysis was constrained by the quality of included trials and missing information about intervention components , there appears to be little differential effect of variations in exercise intervention , particularly on mortality outcomes .
Background While the clinical benefits of exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation are well established , there is extensive variation in the interventions used within these trials .
It is unknown whether variations in individual components of these exercise interventions provide different relative contributions to overall clinical outcomes .
This study aims to systematic ally examine the relationship between individual components of the exercise intervention in cardiac rehabilitation ( such as intensity and frequency ) and clinical outcomes for people with coronary heart disease .