Exercise and heart patients under study
Date: 19-01-2007
Posted by: Anabolic Info Team |
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Three-thousand patients will participate in a study on whether exercise really is good for heart failure patients, doctors in North Carolina said.
While doctors have encouraged exercise for years, "exercise training has not been definitively established as safe in the group of patients who primarily have heart failure," Dalane W. Kitzman -- a cardiologist and principal investigator at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center -- wrote in the American Heart Journal.
"Controlled clinical trials have shown that exercise training improves physiological measurements" such as the distance that patients can walk in six minutes, Kitzman and his colleagues wrote. "None of these trials enrolled a sufficient number of patients to properly evaluate the impact of exercise training on death and hospitalization."
Patients from a wide demographic and socioeconomic population will participate in the study, which will be conducted from 84 study sites across North America and Europe, he said.
