Background: We have shown that 50% of cardiac rehabilitation (CR) patients have at least one exercise session interrupted or cancelled (I/C) . These disruptions were highly correlated with a diabetes mellitus (DM) diagnosis. The aim of this study was to characterize the frequency of I/C at the level of CR sessions and explore the event’s root cause (s) between patients with and without DM.
Methods: We retrospectively reviewed 5,038 CR sessions from 251 patients during 8/2018-9/2021 at our center. The frequency of I/C was normalized to the individual sessions to account for multiple events occurring to a single patient over time. Potential root causes were categorized as blood pressure control, glycemic control, symptomatic arrhythmias, and/or other cardiac symptoms. P-values were obtained by Fischer exact test and student t-test, as appropriate.
Results: Ten percent of all CR sessions (522) were disrupted during the observation period. No baseline differences between were noted [Table 1]. DM patients had 20.2% of sessions disrupted by I/C events compared to 4.0% in non-DM patients (p<0.00001) . The frequency of each root cause per group is noted in Table 2.
Conclusion: Patients with DM have a five-fold increase in CR disruptions (primarily due to glycemic control) when compared to those without DM. Further studies are needed to develop optimal glycemic control strategies that could minimize the disruption of cardiac rehabilitation.
A.A.Khong: None. J.E.Lopez: None. S.Giancaterino: None. M.Junker: None. R.Labiak: None. N.Liu: None. E.Cortez-toledo: None. A.G.Fausto: None. C.Chen: None. D.H.Slack: None.
