Do More Cardiac Rehabilitation Visits Reduce Events Compared With Fewer Visits?

Abstract

A major goal after a cardiovascular event, whether a myocardial infarction, exacerbation of heart failure, or revascularization procedure, is return to the community and resumption of normal health and functioning. This process has a number of components. They include making sure that there is adequate social support, that patients understand what medications to take, that patients understand what activities to begin and when, that appropriate disease management programs have been engaged, and that patients have appointments or a least a well-explained path to reestablishing care with their family doctor, internist, or cardiologist. Another component is helping patients who have become debilitated to various degrees because of their illnesses regain sufficient strength and well-being to function as well as possible. Cardiovascular rehabilitation is a critical part of this process. Article see p 63 The ability to function well in society is a difficult goal that is hard to measure. Thus, evaluating outcomes of cardiovascular rehabilitation can be challenging. Mortality is often used as a metric for outcome because it is easy to measure, but it might well be argued that, for rehabilitation, reducing mortality and future events does not address what rehabilitation is principally for and that a decrease in events adds to the overall benefit. It is in this complicated environment concerning rehabilitation that we must consider the article by Hammill et al.1 They considered the relationship between the number of rehabilitations sessions and subsequent events in a …