Improving the assessment of exercise capacity and cardiorespiratory fitness in patients attending exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation

The aim of this thesis is ‘’Improving the Assessment of Exercise Capacity and Cardiorespiratory Fitness in Patients Attending Exercise-Based Cardiac Rehabilitation’’. Cardiorespiratory capacity is an important predictor of morbidity and mortality in cardiac patients, due to the prognostic power, is an essential outcome to measure in cardiac patients in clinical practice. In cardiac rehabilitation programmes the assessment of cardiorespiratory capacity (by field tests or treadmill test) is an essential practice supported by U.K., European and U.S.A. guidelines, which gives support to patients risk evaluation and stratification, setting individual patients goals, exercise prescription, and evaluation of the same. Overall, the findings of this thesis, which were generate by meta-analysis, crosssectional studies and laboratory research, provide an nsight into the factors associated with patients’ initial performance, and oxygen cost in functional capacity tests. Together, this data may improve the application, interpretation and patient understanding of these test results. One aim of CR is to improve patients’ functional capacity; we provide a standard value for ΔFitness, and information on factors which clinicians may need to consider when setting patient goals and interpreting changes in functional capacity, or ΔFitness due to CR.