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Ed Yeates ReportingIt's the largest and most comprehensive heart failure study ever in the United States, and LDS Hospital is calling for volunteers from all over the Intermountain West to join in the trials.
Steve Leonard is taking a prescription for his heart failure, but this time it's not coming out of a bottle. Inside or out the experiment asks the 56-year old man to do the same thing over and over again. It is a rigid clinical trial, but instead of taking a pill at a certain dosage exercise is the prescription."
Frank Yanowitz, M.D., LDS Hospital Fitness Center: “So we’re comparing a prescribed exercise regimen, five days a week on a bike or a treadmill, to the usual care for patients with heart failure.”
Volunteers like Steve are randomized. Some will get this tailor-made regimen of moderate exercise, with routine follow-up stress tests, while others will get standard care patients with failing hearts usually expect. The theory is that even though the heart is failing, maybe they'll live longer.
Dr. Yanowitz: "That's one of the two major outcomes --mortality. And the second one is we're looking at rehospitalization for heart failure exacerbations."
Those exacerbation's or relapses are both deadly and costly. Fifty percent of all the 550,000 new cases of heart failure each year will die within five years.
Steve had a major heart attack, but with his new prescription...
Steve Leonard: “You might say to some degree that I have beaten the odds. Five years ago I had a heart attack that some doctors say was very questionable that I would have survived.”
Is it the exercise prescription or something else? That's what this landmark study will find out as it measures and evaluates 3,000 patients over a three to five year span.
