Abstract

Purpose: This review provides an overview and quality assessment of existing interventions, assessing the intervention types that are most effective at increasing enrolment and adherence to cardiac rehabilitation in older patients aged ≥65 years

Methods: The review of the literature was performed using electronic databases to search for randomised controlled trials that aimed to increase enrolment and/or adherence to cardiac rehabilitation in older patients aged ≥65 years. The main key words were cardiac rehabilitation, enrolment, adherence and older patients. Studies were included if; (1) the intervention targeted improving enrolment and/or adherence to at least one of the following components of the cardiac rehabilitation programme: exercise, education or maintaining lifestyle changes; (2) assess the effectiveness of an intervention on increasing enrolment and/or adherence to a cardiac rehabilitation programme or any of its components; (3) include measures for assessing enrolment and/or adherence to a cardiac rehabilitation programme or any of its components; (4) the study included patients with a mean age of ≥65 years who were deemed eligible to participate in a cardiac rehabilitation programme. Included studies could be published in any language and there were no date restrictions for included studies. Studies focusing on pharmaceutical adherence were not included for the purpose of this review.

Results: Seven studies were included, with four investigating enrolment (1944 participants) and three assessing adherence to intervention programmes (410 participants). Three studies (1919 participants) reported higher enrolment to cardiac rehabilitation in the intervention group. Two studies that reported increases in enrolment to cardiac rehabilitation were deemed to have an unclear or high risk of bias. All three studies (410 participants) reported better adherence to cardiac rehabilitation in the intervention group when compared to the control group. Two studies that reported better completion of cardiac rehabilitation were deemed to have an unclear or high risk of bias. No formal meta-analysis was conducted due to the observed multiple heterogeneity among outcome measures, the low number of included studies and variability in study designs.

Conclusion: This review found only weak evidence to suggest that interventions can increase enrolment or adherence to cardiac rehabilitation programmes for patients aged ≥65 years, therefore no practice recommendations could be made and further high-quality research is needed in this population group.

Keywords: Systematic review, cardiovascular disease, CVD, older patients, ≥65 years, cardiac rehabilitation, enrolment, attendance, adherence.

Graphical Abstract