Why the study?
Do pharmacologic, mechanical, surgical, nursing, or other treatments improve quality of life in cardiac patient populations?
Do pharmacologic, mechanical, surgical, nursing, or other treatments improve quality of life in cardiac patient populations?
Various cardiac treatments have a small but significant positive effect on quality of life in cardiac patients.
Cardiac treatments yield modest QOL gains warranting patient-centered discussions; reinforces Level 1 evidence across modalities.
This article reports a meta-analysis of 84 studies of quality of life (QOL) in cardiac patient populations published in the 5-year period 1987-1991. Selected methodologies and substantive characteristics of the studies are described. An overall effect size of .31 indicated a small but significant positive effect of pharmacologic, mechanical, surgical, nursing, or other treatment on QOL. No negative effect of treatment was found for any cardiovascular diagnostic category. Homogeneity analysis revealed eight potential moderators of the overall effect size: quality of study, gender of sample, time dimension, sampling method, intervention, marital status of subjects, quality-of-life dimension measured, and sample size.
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Kinney et al. (1996) studied this question.
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