Data to convince policy makers to (re)consider reimbursement regulations for CV rehabilitation.

In 2016 the CROS study has shown that even in the era of statin use and acute revascularisation, multidisciplinary cardiovascular (CV) rehabilitation leads to significant reductions in morbidity and mortality in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) (1).

As a result, CV rehabilitation is a class 1A intervention in the secondary prevention and should thus be considered as mandatory to every patient with CAD (2).

Although progress is being made is exercise prescription to these patients (3), the impact of the different (especially non-exercise) components of CV rehabilitation remained however to be examined in greater detail (e.g. nutritional counselling, risk factor modification, psychosocial management, patient education). This is important, since a recent meta-analysis demonstrated that CV rehabilitation programs offering more core components achieved greater reductions in all-cause mortality than those offering less (4).

In December 2018, Kabboul and colleagues published a meta-analysis examining the impact of the core components of CV rehabilitation, including nutritional counselling (NC), risk factor modification, psychosocial management (PM), patient education (PE), and exercise training (ET)), on mortality (all-cause and CV) and morbidity (fatal and non-fatal myocardial infarction (MI), coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG), percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), and hospitalisation (all-cause and CV)) (5).

Ultimately, 148 RCTs (including 50,965 participants) were included. Main effects models were best fitting for mortality (for all-cause, specifically PM (hazard ratio (HR) = 0.68) and ET (HR = 0.75), MI (specifically PM (HR = 0.76), ET (HR = 0.75) and PE (HR = 0.68)) and hospitalisation (for all-cause, PM (HR = 0.76). For revascularization (including CABG and PCI), the full interaction model (thus including all components) was best-fitting.

Given that each component, individual or in combination, was associated with lower mortality or morbidity, comprehensive CV rehabilitation should thus offered to every patients with CAD. These data should convince policy makers to (re)consider re-imbursement regulations in CV rehabilitation, and/or support to CAD patients.

Note: The content of this article reflects the personal opinion of the author and is not necessarily the official position of the European Society of Cardiology.