Effects on quality of life with comprehensive rehabilitation after acute myocardial infarction

Abstract

This investigation was designed to determine the impact of a brief period of cardiac rehabilitation, initiated within 6 weeks of acute myocardial infarction (AMI), on both disease-specific and generic health-related quality of life, exercise tolerance and return to work after AMI. With a stratified, parallel group design, 201 low-risk patients with evidence of depression or anxiety, or both, after AMI, were randomized to either an 8-week program of exercise conditioning and behavioral counseling or to conventional care. Although the differences were small, significantly greater improvement was seen in rehabilitation group patients at 8 weeks in the emotions dimension of a new disease-specific, health-related Quality of Life Questionnaire, in their state of anxiety and in exercise tolerance. All measures of health-related quality of life in both groups improved significantly over the 12-month followup period. However, the 95% confidence intervals around differences between groups at the 12-month follow-up effectively excluded sustained, clinically important benefits of rehabilitation in disease-specific (limitations, −2.70, 1.40; emotions, −4.86, 1.10, where negative values favor conventional care and positive values favor rehabilitation) and generic health-related quality of life (time trade-off, −0.062, 0.052; quality of well-being, −0.042, 0.035) or in exercise tolerance (−38.5, 52.1 kpm/min); also, return to work was similar in the 2 groups (relative risk, 0.93; confidence interval, 0.71, 1.64). It is concluded that in patients with evidence of depression or anxiety, or both, exercise conditioning and behavioral counseling after AMI was associated with an accelerated recovery in some outcome measures at 8 weeks, but by 12 months similar improvements were seen in both diseasespecific and generic health-related quality of life and in other outcome measures when compared with conventional care in this community.