Aerobic exercise prescription in adult heart transplant recipients: a review.
BACKGROUND
Heart transplantation is a gold-standard treatment for selected patients in the terminal stages of heart failure and it can improve patients' quality of life, exercise capacity, and survival. Despite of the exercise performance in heart transplant recipients increases with respect to pre-transplantation, it still remains subnormal when compared with healthy subjects. Exercise training is an important nonpharmacological tool in heart transplant recipients to improve the exercise capacity, muscle strength, quality of life, and the chronotropic response. Despite this there is no consensus about what methods of aerobic exercise prescription are more adequate.


OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this review is to provide an up-to-date summary of the direct and indirect methods of prescription of aerobic exercise training in heart transplant recipients.


CONCLUSIONS
The indirect methods of aerobic exercise prescription seem to be very frail and they do not seem to be reliable in heart transplant recipients.
Carvalho
Vitor Oliveira
VO
Laboratório de Insuficiência Cardíaca e Transplante do Instituto do Coração do Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina da USP (InCor HC-FMUSP), São Paulo, Brazil. vitor.carvalho@usp.br
Bocchi
Edimar Alcides
EA
Guimarães
Guilherme Veiga
GV
D000328:Adult; D005080:Exercise Test; D005081:Exercise Therapy; D016027:Heart Transplantation; D006801:Humans; D018579:Patient Selection; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D012129:Respiratory Function Tests; D016896:Treatment Outcome