Disease management programmes for patients with coronary heart disease and chronic heart failure in primary care can prove effective. On adopting the right programme for the management of heart disease, patients of chronic heart disease can find a great deal of improvement. To assess the effect of a disease management programme on heart patients, researchers at the University of Leicester investigated 1, 316 patients with coronary heart disease, chronic heart failure, or both. These patients were randomly assigned to participate in the disease management programme or to regular care. The results highlighted that patients with coronary heart disease (but not those with chronic heart failure) showed significant improvements in quality of life evaluations after 12 months of participation in the disease management program compared with patients in the control group. The improvement in angina (cardiac chest pain) was significantly better for the intervention group patients than for the control patients. Assessment of blood pressure after 12 months of follow-up showed that patients in the disease management group had adequate blood pressure control as compared to those in the control group. Similarly, those in the disease management group were also more likely to participate in a smoking cessation program and were more likely to have a drop in their blood cholesterol level to below 5 mmol/L compared with patients in the control group. Thus, disease management programmes can lead to improvements in the care of patients with coronary heart disease and presumed chronic heart failure in primary care.
Heart,
November 2007