If you have heart wellness problems, the last thing you want to hear is that you need to improve your fitness levels. Surely it’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? If your heart is failing, why on earth would you stress it out with exercise? It’s common for heart patients to fear that exercise will have a negative impact on their wellbeing, and so a US professor is beginning the first study to target this problem.
Bunny Pozehl, a nurse practitioner with Bryan Heart and a professor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Nursing, Lincoln division, explained that when your doctor tells you to improve your fitness levels, adherence is critical. Your heart is a muscle, and so, much like any other muscle, it needs to be exercised to build strength, endurance and efficiency.
According to Pozehl, fear is the biggest deterrent for heart-failure patients, at they worry that that if they push their heart to work harder, it will give out and stop. However, the deterrent doesn’t stop with fear, as other heart patients and doctors have cited cost, motivation, knowledge of what to do and how to do it, and other unknowns, as possible deterrents for exercise. So what will help heart-failure patients stick with their exercise programmes?
This is what Pozehl’s five-year, $3.36-million study hopes to answer. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, researchers will follow 246 heart-failure patients at Bryan Heart in Lincoln, at Michigan’s Wayne State University and the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, continually adding patients to the study over the next two years. Until now, no one has studied what would make heart-failure patients stick with a health exercise regime.
‘I want our research to be something that really helps patients,’ Pozehl said. Patients are often told to get 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise a week, or 30 minutes a day, and respond with disbelief. Pozehl explained, ‘They are afraid. They don’t know how. One of the barriers for our patients is they get short of breath, tire more easily and they are afraid to initiate exercise on their own.
She added, ‘They fear that exercise will stress their failing heart too much. What they don’t realize is exercise is beneficial and will actually help them feel better and have more energy.’ According to Pozehl, patients are always given that message, but hearing it, processing it and adhering to it are completely different things. She concluded that the bottom line is ‘we want to try to figure out what helps and what doesn’t.’
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