Breathing training can help heart failure patients
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People with heart failure and difficulty breathing may benefit considerably from using a device to train the muscles involved in breathing, Brazilian researchers report.
The Threshold Inspiratory Muscle Trainer (Healthscan Products, Inc.) applies a load while subjects breathe in, thus training the muscles to become stronger.
Dr. Jorge P. Ribeiro of Hospital de Clinicas de Porto Allegre and colleagues randomly assigned 32 patients to either a 12-week home-based program using the device with an inspiratory load maintained at 30 percent of maximal inspiratory pressure, or to a placebo program in which the participants had no inspiratory load.
Muscle training resulted in a 115 percent improvement in maximal inspiratory pressure, and a 17 percent increase in peak oxygen uptake.
Also in a test measuring how far the subjects were able to walk in 6 minutes, the distance increased from an average of 449 meters to 550 meters, the investigators report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Active treatment patients also experienced an increase in quality-of-life scores.
The researchers point out that although the training was not continued beyond 12 weeks, part of the effect on maximal inspiratory pressure and on quality of life was still maintained after a year.
“Together with the observations from other small trials,” Dr. Ribeiro told Reuters Health, “our data indicate that inspiratory muscle training is a safe intervention that can be considered for the management of patients with chronic heart failure, particularly those with weakness in inspiratory muscles.”
Given these findings, the team also concludes that it may be worth screening heart failure patients for breathing muscle weakness.
SOURCE: Journal of the American College of Cardiology, February 21, 2006.
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