CHICAGO, April 7 - Regular exercise is safe for patients with heart failure and may lower their risk of dying from heart disease or delay hospitalization, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
Exercise has well established heart benefits, but doctors have long considered it risky for patients with heart failure, a condition in which the heart gradually loses its ability to pump blood efficiently, leaving organs starved for oxygen.
"We obviously thought there was a whole host of potential benefits of improving the physical state of the heart and improving blood flow, but we didn't know if that potential benefit would carry excessive risk," said Dr. Christopher O'Connor of Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
O'Connor and colleagues studied 2,331 heart failure patients in the United States, Canada and France. All received the usual care, which included drugs such as ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers, and half also did an exercise training program.
Exercisers started with a goal of three, 30-minute sessions a week on a stationary bicycle or treadmill. After three months, they moved on to workouts at home, with a goal of 40 minutes five days a week.
After two and a half years, the researchers found those in the exercise group had a 15 percent lower risk of death from heart disease or hospitalization due to heart failure. Those who exercised had no greater risk of falls, fractures or additional heart problems.
"It was very safe. We did not find any evidence that exercise training in these significantly ill cardiac patients had any additional risk," O'Connor said in a telephone interview.
He described the 15 percent reduction in hospitalization and death from heart disease as "modest," but noted it came on top of the benefits patients were already getting from very effective heart medications.
Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, which funded the study, said it has important implications for the 5 million Americans who have heart failure.
"As the number of people affected by heart failure is expected to rise with the aging U.S. population, it is promising to know that patients can benefit from a low-risk method to improve their health," she said in a statement.
A study last year found the number of people 65 or older hospitalized for heart failure more than doubled in the past 27 years and is likely to keep climbing unless prevention measures are adopted quickly.
The American Heart Association estimates the condition cost $34.8 billion (S$52.6 billion) last year in the United States for direct and indirect treatment costs.
