Exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation with and without neuromuscular electrical stimulation and its effect on exercise tolerance and life quality of persons with chronic heart failure
Abstrakt
The study compares the effect of an exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation program with a program combining physical exercise and lower extremity ne uromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) on the recovery of patients with chronic heart failure (CHF ) with NYHA II-III symptoms. Seventy two patients with stable CHF were randomly distributed to four groups th at received exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation and pharmacological treatment.
Groups I and II were additionally administered NMES (35 Hz and 10 Hz, respectively) and in Group III sham NMES was a pplied. Group IV (controls) received solely pharmacological and exercise treatment.
Exercise toleranc e and quality of life were assessed in patients pre- treatment and at week 3. Three weeks of re habilitation induced significant increases ( p 0.05).
In none of the groups were the left ventricle end-systolic and end-diastolic diameters (mm) measured at week 3 significantly different from their baseline values ( p > 0.05). Exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation contributed to higher exercise tolerance, LVEF and quality of life of CHF patients (NYHA II-III), contra ry to cardiac reha bilitation combined with lower extremity NMES (35 Hz and 10 Hz) that failed to induce such improvements.
More research is necessary to assess the therapeutic efficacy of NMES applied to CHF patients with NYHA IV symptoms.