Aerobic exercise prescription in adult heart transplant recipients: a review.

Background: Heart transplantation is a gold-standard treatment for selected patients in the terminal stages of heart failure and it can improve patients' quality of life, exercise capacity, and survival. Despite of the exercise performance in heart transplant recipients increases with respect to pre-transplantation, it still remains subnormal when compared with healthy subjects. Exercise training is an important nonpharmacological tool in heart transplant recipients to improve the exercise capacity, muscle strength, quality of life, and the chronotropic response. Despite this there is no consensus about what methods of aerobic exercise prescription are more adequate.

Aim: The purpose of this review is to provide an up-to-date summary of the direct and indirect methods of prescription of aerobic exercise training in heart transplant recipients.

Conclusion: The indirect methods of aerobic exercise prescription seem to be very frail and they do not seem to be reliable in heart transplant recipients.