Are exercise prescriptions for patients with cardiovascular disease, made by physiotherapists, in agreement with European recommendations?

Aims: Physiotherapists often treat patients with (elevated risk for) cardiovascular disease (CVD), and should thus be able to provide evidence-based exercise advice to these patients. This study, therefore, aims to examine whether exercise prescriptions by physiotherapists to patients with CVD are in accordance with European recommendations.

Methods and results: This prospective observational survey included forty-seven Belgian physiotherapists. The participants agreed to prescribe exercise intensity, frequency, session duration, program duration, and exercise type (endurance or strength training) for the same three patient cases. Exercise prescriptions were compared between physiotherapists and relations with their characteristics were studied. The agreement between physiotherapists' exercise prescriptions and those from European recommendations ('agreement score': based on a maximal score of 60/per case) was assessed. A wide inter-clinician variability was noticed for all exercise modalities, leading to a large variance for total peak-effort training minutes (from 461 up to 9000 over the three cases). The exercise frequency was prescribed fully out of range of the recommendations and the prescription of additional exercise modes was generally flawed. Exercise intensity and program duration were prescribed partially correct. The addition of strength exercises and session duration was prescribed correctly. This led to physiotherapist agreement scores of 25.3 ± 9.6, 23.2 ± 9.9, and 27.1 ± 10.6 (all out of 60), for cases one, two, and three, respectively. A greater agreement score was found in younger colleagues and those holding a Ph.D.

Conclusion: Exercise prescriptions for CVD patients vary widely among physiotherapists and often disagree with European recommendations.

Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05449652.