Research

Mixed

Exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation reduces all-cause mortality by 27% and cardiac mortality by 31% in patients with coronary heart disease compared to usual care.

If you have coronary heart disease, participating in a supervised exercise-based rehabilitation program significantly lowers your risk of dying from heart-related causes. This benefit is seen even with exercise-only programs, without needing additional educational or psychological components. Consult your doctor to find a suitable program.

WeakSupportsHIGH confidence
The pooled effect estimate for total mortality for the exercise only intervention shows a 27% reduction in all cause mortality (random effects model OR 0.73 95% confidence interval 0.54 to 0.98). Total cardiac mortality was reduced by 31% (random effects model OR 0.69 95% confidence interval 0.51 to 0.94)... in the exercise only... groups respectively.
J. Jolliffe et al. · The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews · 2001

Why this rating

This is a Cochrane systematic review of 36 RCTs involving 8440 patients, representing high-quality evidence.

Source

Exercise-based rehabilitation for coronary heart disease

J. Jolliffe et al. · The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews · 2001

DOI 10.1002/14651858.cd001800

Meta-analysis · 32 studiesCited 944×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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