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Dear Diabetes Club Reader: 80 percent of diabetic patients die of a heart attack. This tells you how important it is to practice some kind of exercise to control diabetes and heart disease. This article is very illustrative of the sad state of affairs among people who already have had an episode of heart disease; don’t be part of this statistic, please.

Most Heart Patients Skimp on Exercise After Rehab
A year later, only 37 percent were doing cardio exercises 3 times a week, study finds

FRIDAY, June 18 (HealthDay News) — Only about one-third of cardiac patients were doing regular heart-healthy exercises a year after a heart attack, bypass surgery or angioplasty, researchers have found.

The Case Western Reserve University research team followed 248 patients after they completed a 12-week cardio rehabilitation program to help train them to exercise. Exercise patterns in the longitudinal study were tracked through heart monitors worn by the patients. After one year, only 37 percent of the patients were exercising even three times a week, the investigators found.

Women were less likely than men to exercise, while younger men were more likely than women or older men to stick with their exercise program, the study authors noted.

“Many women traditionally put caretaking of their families before their health needs,” lead investigator Mary Dolansky, an assistant professor of nursing, said in a university news release.

“The downward trend [in exercise] over time concerns us, especially since current guidelines suggest exercising five times a week,” Dolansky added.

It may be necessary to develop new interventions to help cardiac patients realize that they need to make regularexercise a lifelong habit, she added.

The follow-up findings from the study, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, appeared recently in the journal Research in Gerontological Nursing.

More information
The American Heart Association has more about cardiac rehabilitation.

– Robert Preidt

SOURCE: Case Western Reserve University, news release, June 15, 2010
Last Updated: June 19, 2010
Copyright © 2010 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

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