INTRODUCTION Cardiac rehabilitation programs are well recognized as being essential to the comprehensive care of patients with cardiovascular disease and chronic heart failure. These programs aim at reducing cardiovascular risks, promoting healthy lifestyle behaviours and compliance as well as limiting disability and increasing quality of life (QoL) of cardiac patients. PURPOSE To evaluate th...

OBJECTIVE To document the risk-factor profile and risk-factor knowledge of patients with an acute coronary syndrome (ACS) not attending standard cardiac rehabilitation. DESIGN AND SETTING Cross-sectional comparison in a tertiary hospital. PARTICIPANTS Patients admitted to hospital with an ACS, residing within 20 km of the hospital, and without severe comorbidity who did not access cardiac r...

Pulmonary rehabilitation and cardiac rehabilitation are components of guideline management for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Both have been shown to increase exercise tolerance, quality of life (QOL), and disease self-management. 2,3 However, in Canada these patients do not always receive the rehabilitation they need: Approximately ...

Comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation reduces mortality and morbidity but is utilised by only a fraction of eligible cardiac patients, with the participation rate of women being only about half that of men. This quantitative review assesses 32 studies meeting inclusion criteria, describing 16,804 patients, 5882 of whom were female. It was found that the main predictor of referral to a cardiac re...

OBJECTIVE Many patients fail to attend cardiac rehabilitation. Attempts to identify sociodemographic or clinical predictors of non-attendance have not been very successful; therfore, this study aimed to determine whether the illness beliefs held during hospitalisation by patients who had suffered acute myocardial infarction or who had undergone coronary artery bypass graft surgery could predict...

Remote ischemic preconditioning (rIPC) has been shown to reduce the extent of myocardial infarction during an ischemic event as well as prior to a planned cardiac intervention. Vigorous exercise has been shown to have similar cardiovascular benefits to remote ischemic preconditioning in healthy individuals. Despite this effect, many individuals who exercise regularly present with cardiovascular...

BACKGROUND Cardiac rehabilitation is an important component of recovery from coronary events but uptake and adherence to such programmes are below the recommended levels. This aim is to update a previous non-Cochrane systematic review which examined interventions that may potentially improve cardiac patient uptake and adherence in rehabilitation or its components and concluded that there is ins...

AIM The purpose of this study was to clarify whether type 2 diabetic patients with coronary disease are subject to similar benefits on heart rate recovery (HRR) as non-diabetic coronary individuals after cardiac rehabilitation, assessing separately male and female subjects separately. METHODS Data used for the analyses were from an eight-week phase II cardiac rehabilitation including 284 pati...