[Cardiac rehabilitation and secondary prevention in ischemic cardiopathy]

The experience gathered in the last thirty years has proved that cardiac rehabilitation improves the quality of life of the patients and contributes to their early return to work. As it consists in therapeutic systems of multifactorial action (physical training, psychological guidelines and control of risk factors), it can exert a positive influence on the prognosis through each of those actions or their sum. Despite the difficulties in the analysis of these programmes (need for a large number of patients and long follow-up periods), some studies and meta-analysis have proved that the incidence of complications and the mortality rate decrease in rehabilitated patients. Mortality goes down by 20-25% which is similar to the results obtained with perfectly accepted therapies, such a beta-blocking treatment, with the advantage that cardiac rehabilitation is cheaper and produces fewer side-effects. It goes without saying that these systems of prognosis action are complementary in a large number of patients.