Individualized approach urged
Dr. Sharma was a coauthor of the recent article challenging the traditional restrictive approach to exercise for athletes diagnosed with HCM and other inherited cardiovascular diseases. The article suggested that individualized recommendations, taking risks into consideration, can help guide those who want to exercise or participate in competitive sports.
Dr. Sharma also is a coauthor of a 6-month follow-up to the SAFE-HCM study, which compared the effects of a supervised 12-week high-intensity exercise program to usual care in low-risk individuals with HCM (mean age, 45.7).
In the 6-month follow-up study, published as an abstract in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology 2021 supplement, “exercising individuals had improved functional capacity and atherosclerotic risk profile and there were no differences in the composite safety outcomes [cardiovascular death, cardiac arrest, device therapy, exercise-induced syncope, sustained VT, NSVT, or sustained atrial arrhythmias] between exercising individuals and usual care individuals,” Dr. Sharma said.
The full study will soon be ready to submit for publication, he added.
No commercial funding or relevant conflicts of interest were disclosed.
A version of this article first appeared on Medscape.com.