Evaluating Exercise Tolerance in Stable Heart Failure Patients

The research was carried out according to the Declaration of Helsinki. The author’s institutional review board approved the study, and the Clinical Trial Registry number is NCT04038723. All participants provided their written informed consent after understanding the experimental procedure. HF patients, diagnosed according to the Framingham HF diagnostic criteria [24 (link)], who had stable clinical presentations ≥ 4 weeks and received individualized patient education under optimized guideline-based management [25 (link)], were initially surveyed. Individuals who were > 80 years old and < 20 years old, were unable to perform exercise due to other noncardiac diseases, were pregnant, would have future cardiac transplantation within 6 months, had uncompensated HF, and had an estimated glomerular filtration rate < 30 ml/min/1.73 m² were not enrolled in the study. We also excluded individuals with absolute contraindications for exercise suggested by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) [26 ].