India has the dubious distinction of being the heart disease (HD) and diabetes capital of the world. HD is the leading cause of death and the worst part is that it strikes Indians during the prime years of their life. The HD is a largely preventable disease and if appropriate lifestyle measures, medication and appropriate physical exercises are taken early enough one may never need to undergo the emotional turmoil. Cardiac Rehabilitation (CR) program is for those who have already suffered a cardiac event, such as a heart attack, bypass surgery or angioplasty. CR is an intervention that has a well-documented history of benefiting patients. These benefits include improvements in functional capacity, quality of life, and morbidity and mortality. Reductions in morbidity and mortality with CR are equivalent to many of the best available pharmacologic and invasive interventions.The CR is Class-I-level recommendation (signifying a treatment that should be performed or administered) for referral to CR in those groups of patients mentioned above. Yet CR participation and referral has not increased over the last decade; a time during which invasive interventions (largely PCI) have skyrocketed, despite the observation that PCI does not improve outcomes.Firstly, the reason was cost. The government schemes like Yeshaswini, BPL, APL card and the insurance companies needs to include the CR program at a cost so that all type of cardiac patients can benefit which is now lagging. The benefits of CR are greatly under-appreciated in both the public and the medical community. Greater efforts are needed to educate health care providers and the public regarding the benefits of CR. Hence educating these health care professionals, other health care providers, patients, families, health care systems regarding the indisputable benefits of multidisciplinary CR will go a long way toward broadening the proportion of patients who receive these benefits.
PDF