Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing and Cardiac Rehabilitation

At the beginning of the CR program, the patients underwent a cardiopulmonary exercise test (CPX) using Cpex1 (Inter Riha, Tokyo, Japan) and a stress test system with an ML9000 electrocardiogram (Fukuda Denshi, Tokyo, Japan). The CR program was the same as in our previous report [15 (link)]. In brief, the patients participated in a supervised exercise training program at the hospital’s gym one to three times a week. The exercise workload was based on the AT according to the CPX results. Each session lasted 1 h, beginning with a warm-up exercise for 5 min, followed by 30 min of cycling with an aero bike (75XLIII; Combi, Tokyo, Japan) or walking on a treadmill (TRD-350; Sakai Medical, Tokyo, Japan) at the patient’s indicated exercise intensity and 25 min of cooling down and stretching.