Short-term exercise improves heart failure
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In patients with heart failure, one month of moderate exercise significantly improves heart function and aerobic capacity and at least partially improves related symptoms, results of a study indicate.
Dr. Stephen F. Crouse from Texas A&M University in College Station presented the study Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Physiological Society, part of the Experimental Biology 2008 scientific conference underway in San Diego.
The study involved 68 women and 298 men with heart failure who were referred to the Center for Cardiovascular Rehabilitation in Bad Schallerbach, Austria for 4 weeks of residential cardiac rehabilitation to improve heart function.
The subjects rode a stationary bicycle 6 times a week for 14 to 22 minutes, depending on the individual patient’s exercise capacity at the start of the program. They also took a brisk 45-minute walk daily, working at 60 to 70 percent of their maximal heart rate.
At the end of the 4 weeks, patients performed on average 18 percent better on the stationary bike. They also experienced significant improvements in heart rate and blood pressure.
Furthermore, Crouse told Reuters Health, “Only 25 days of exercise training as part of a residential cardiac rehabilitation program (seemed to improve) heart muscle function.”
These are “encouraging” findings, Crouse and colleagues point out in a meeting abstract, which suggest that short-term exercise training can have a “relatively powerful effect” as a part of cardiac rehabilitation programs to improve heart function and to at least partly relieve the symptoms of heart failure.
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