The psychological component of cardiac rehabilitation drives benefits achieved

Cardiac patients with psychological disorders suffer two times greater rates of morbidity and mortality on top of their distress, versus cardiac patients without. Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) associations globally call for programmes to be comprehensive, including, most relevant here, delivery of interventions to promote patient’s psychosocial well-being to address this elevated risk. Albus et al.1 published a thoughtful meta-analysis in an earlier issue of this journal on the effect of the addition of psychological interventions to CR on clinical and psychosocial outcomes, adding to the now plethora of reviews in this area. As alluded to in the accompanying editorial by Pedersen and Doyle, network meta-analysis is a better approach to teasing apart the impact of the various core components of CR on outcomes. This way, we can account for all components delivered in both the intervention as well as comparison and/or usual care arms. This is particularly true given the...