TY  - JOUR
A1  - Güder, Gülmisal
A1  - Wilkesmann, Joana
A1  - Scholz, Nina
A1  - Leppich, Robert
A1  - Düking, Peter
A1  - Sperlich, Billy
A1  - Rost, Christian
A1  - Frantz, Stefan
A1  - Morbach, Caroline
A1  - Sahiti, Floran
A1  - Stefenelli, Ulrich
A1  - Breunig, Margret
A1  - Störk, Stefan
T1  - Establishing a cardiac training group for patients with heart failure: the "HIP-in-Würzburg" study
JF  - Clinical Research in Cardiology
N2  - Background
Exercise training in heart failure (HF) is recommended but not routinely offered, because of logistic and safety-related reasons. In 2020, the German Society for Prevention&Rehabilitation and the German Society for Cardiology requested establishing dedicated ""HF training groups."" Here, we aimed to implement and evaluate the feasibility and safety of one of the first HF training groups in Germany.
Methods
Twelve patients (three women) with symptomatic HF (NYHA class II/III) and an ejection fraction ≤ 45% participated and were offered weekly, physician-supervised exercise training for 1 year. Patients received a wrist-worn pedometer (M430 Polar) and underwent the following assessments at baseline and after 4, 8 and 12 months: cardiopulmonary exercise test, 6-min walk test, echocardiography (blinded reading), and quality of life assessment (Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire, KCCQ).
Results
All patients (median age [quartiles] 64 [49; 64] years) completed the study and participated in 76% of the offered 36 training sessions. The pedometer was worn ≥ 1000 min per day over 86% of the time. No cardiovascular events occurred during training. Across 12 months, NT-proBNP dropped from 986 pg/ml [455; 1937] to 483 pg/ml [247; 2322], and LVEF increased from 36% [29;41] to 41% [32;46]%, (p for trend = 0.01). We observed no changes in exercise capacity except for a subtle increase in peak VO2% predicted, from 66.5 [49; 77] to 67 [52; 78]; p for trend = 0.03. The physical function and social limitation domains of the KCCQ improved from 60 [54; 82] to 71 [58; 95, and from 63 [39; 83] to 78 [64; 92]; p for trend = 0.04 and = 0.01, respectively. Positive trends were further seen for the clinical and overall summary scores.
Conclusion
This pilot study showed that the implementation of a supervised HF-exercise program is feasible, safe, and has the potential to improve both quality of life and surrogate markers of HF severity. This first exercise experiment should facilitate the design of risk-adopted training programs for patients with HF.
KW  - m exercise training
KW  - heart failure
KW  - cardiac training group
KW  - heart failure training group
Y1  - 2022
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-266678
SN  - 1861-0692
VL  - 111
ER  -