Published on
Updated
Reading 2 mins.
According to a recent statement from the American Heart Association, supervised exercise therapy can help heart failure patients more than drugs. Explanations.
Heart failure is a pathology that is characterized by a weakness of the heart to perform its functions and pump blood throughout the body, either due to stiffness of the heart muscle or due to loss of pumping strength. . So there are different types of heart failure.
Studies on the interest of cardiac rehabilitation
In a press release, the American heart association (AHA) is interested in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, in which the pumping force of the heart muscle is intact.
Heart failure is caused by an abnormal relaxation of the myocardium during diastole (diastolic dysfunction). Also called “diastolic heart failure”, this syndrome is characterized by a heart that cannot pump with enough force to push enough blood into the circulation. The patient experiences dyspnea (difficulty breathing) with less exertion and is more likely to suffer from pulmonary edema.
In April 2022, recommendations were released by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology advocating supervised exercise training for people with heart failure of any type.
Different studies, which lasted from one to eight months, evaluated exercises for heart failure with preserved ejection fraction: walking, exercise bike, high intensity interval training, resistance training and dance.
These supervised exercise therapies took place over three sessions per week, for each of the studies.
Prioritize guided exercises rather than medication
In all of these studies, the researchers measured the maximum oxygen consumption during physical exertion.
In people with heart failure, peak oxygen uptake is often about 30% lower than in a healthy person. Thanks to supervised cardiac rehabilitation exercises, this figure is improving. thus, it was found:
- An increase in maximum oxygen consumption of 12 to 14%;
- An increase in total exercise time of 21%;
- An improvement in quality of life scores (Minnesota Living with Heart Failure questionnaire) of 4 to 9 points.
“Exercise helps improve the pumping ability of the heart, decreases blood vessel stiffness, and improves skeletal muscle function and energy capacity“says Dr. Vandana Sachdev, chair of the scientific statement’s editorial board.
“Exercise capacity is an independent and clinically meaningful patient outcome, and research has indicated that guided exercise therapy is actually more effective in improving quality of life for people with heart failure with fractional heart failure. ‘preserved ejection than most drugs’.