Key result
Cardiac rehabilitation programs improved cognitive impairments, particularly attention, executive function, and memory domains, in patients with cardiovascular diseases across 9 included studies.
Why the study?
Cognitive impairments are common in cardiovascular diseases and reduce quality of life and treatment adherence, but the effects of cardiac rehabilitation on cognitive function in these patients required systematic examination.
Does cardiac rehabilitation improve cognitive function in patients with cardiovascular diseases?
Systematic Review
Does cardiac rehabilitation improve cognitive function in patients with cardiovascular diseases?
Cardiac rehabilitation programs may improve cognitive impairments, particularly in attention, executive function, and memory, in patients with cardiovascular diseases.
May support integrating cognitive monitoring into cardiac rehabilitation for CVD patients; extends systematic evidence for non-cardiac benefits.
BACKGROUND: One of the most common problems associated with cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) is cognitive impairments (CIs) leading to reduced quality of life and treatment adherence in patients. The aim of this systematic review was to examine the effects of cardiac rehabilitation (CR) on cognitive function in CVD patients. MATERIAL AND METHOD: PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science and Ovid MEDLINE databases were searched for identification the relevant studies without language restriction. We included the studies published from root to August 2019, evaluating the effects of CR on at least one type of cognitive functions through valid neuropsychological tests. Finally, nine studies with different study designs were entered in this systematic review. The full texts of these studies were critically appraised with various quality assessment tools. RESULT: Patients were evaluated by different cognitive domains including global cognition, attention, executive function, memory and language prior to and following CR program among included studies. Most of the included studies reported significant cognitive improvement of the attention/executive function and memory domains. Two studies showed statistically significant improvement in global cognition using Modified Mini-Mental State (3MS) and Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) tools. Similar effects were not found in language domain. CONCLUSION: It seems that cognitive impairments in CVD patients can be improved with CR program. Because this review is limited by low number of included studies, and there were various study designs without control groups, the results should be generalized cautiously. Further studies are recommended.
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Dabbaghipour et al. (2020) conducted a systematic review in Cardiovascular diseases. Cardiac rehabilitation was evaluated on Cognitive function. Cardiac rehabilitation programs improved cognitive impairments, particularly attention, executive function, and memory domains, in patients with cardiovascular diseases across 9 included studies.
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