Research
Mixed
Cardiac rehabilitation, whether exercise-only or comprehensive, does not significantly reduce the rate of non-fatal myocardial infarction recurrence.
While cardiac rehabilitation saves lives, it does not appear to prevent heart attacks from happening again. It is crucial for survival, but not for preventing non-fatal cardiac events.
WeakRefutesHIGH confidence
We found no evidence of an effect of the interventions on the occurrence of non-fatal myocardial infarction... Neither exercise only rehabilitation or comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation had any effect on recurrence of non-fatal MI, with pooled effect estimates of 0.96 (0.69, 1.35) and 0.88 (0.7, 1.12) respectively.
Why this rating
Based on pooled data from multiple RCTs.
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×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
- 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.Weak
- Comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation (exercise plus education/psychosocial support) significantly reduces total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol, whereas exercise-only interventions do not significantly affect these lipid profiles.Weak
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