Effects of Nursing Interventions on Quality of Life in Elderly Patients with Cardiovascular Diseases: A Systematic Review

Objective To systematically evaluate the effects of different nursing intervention models on the quality of life of elderly patients with cardiovascular diseases, integrate current clinical research evidence, and provide evidence-based references for optimizing standardized nursing protocols and improving long-term prognoses for elderly patients with cardiovascular diseases. Methods Databases including CNKI, Wanfang, VIP, PubMed, Embase and Cochrane Library were electronically searched from database inception to June 2026. Randomized controlled trials and prospective cohort studies involving elderly patients with cardiovascular diseases receiving specialized nursing interventions were included. Basic experiments, reviews, case reports, studies with missing data and non-Chinese-English publications were excluded. Two researchers independently completed literature screening, data extraction and quality assessment. A descriptive systematic review was adopted for qualitative integration and analysis of included studies, so as to summarize the application effects and existing research limitations of different nursing interventions. Results A total of 28 publications were finally enrolled, including 21 Chinese core articles and 7 English articles, with an overall sample size of 4 326 participants. The intervention models of included studies were categorized into five types: transitional care, comprehensive individualized nursing, mindfulness-based psychological nursing, cardiac exercise rehabilitation nursing, and special-topic health education. Multiple studies indicated that multi-mode integrated nursing interventions could significantly improve the multi-dimensional quality of life (physiological, psychological and social functioning) in elderly patients with cardiovascular diseases, enhance medication adherence, and reduce the incidence of adverse cardiovascular events and unplanned readmissions. In contrast, single short-term health education and basic nursing interventions exerted limited effects on improving long-term quality of life. Existing studies had problems such as lack of unified standards for intervention protocols, large variations in follow-up duration, high research heterogeneity, and insufficient evidence for subgroups of frail advanced-age patients. Conclusion Diversified integrated nursing interventions are effective in improving the quality of life of elderly patients with cardiovascular diseases. Among them, transitional comprehensive nursing and exercise rehabilitation combined with psychological nursing yield the most prominent benefits. Standardization of relevant clinical research needs to be further improved. High-quality studies with large-sample, multi-center design and long-term follow-up should be carried out in the future to construct standardized and individualized nursing systems suitable for elderly Chinese patients with cardiovascular diseases.