Dr. Megan A. Sattler, discusses how cardiac rehabilitation has evolved to a more intensive, patient centric approach, and how the Pritikin Program helps prevent and reverses the progression of heart disease and other health concerns.
I'm Megan Sattler and I'm an interventional cardiologist with Sentara cardiology specialists, primarily based at Sentara Care Plex Hospital. And today, I'm going to talk to you about critic in intensive cardiac rehab. Since the 19 fifties, cardiac rehab has evolved to include intensive cardiac rehab, intensive cardiac rehab is a more comprehensive patient centered approach to post procedural recovery and also post hospitalization recovery for patients with heart failure. The structure of any cardiac rehab program, but especially an intensive cardiac rehab program is threefold. It starts with phase one, which is in the hospital as an introduction to cardiac rehab. Phase two, which is the vast majority of the program in the outpatient setting. And then phase three is where we really hope that patients will continue what they have learned lifelong. There are two main commercially available intensive cardiac rehab programs. One is the Ornish intensive cardiac rehab program which has already been a part of Sentara at Princess Anne. It was actually the first Ornish cardiac rehab program in Virginia. Continuing with that, Sentara is also going to now have the first two Pritikin intensive cardiac rehab programs in the State of Virginia. And those are going to be centered at Sentara Care plex hospital and Sentara Martha Jefferson. While the Ornish cardiac rehab diet focuses mainly on ultra low fat Pritikin is more of a Mediterranean style diet. So while it is largely plant based, it still allows for small amounts of animal products, particularly lean meats and fish. The goal of this is to hopefully allow for patients to be more compliant with a diet long term. Otherwise, Pritikin is very similar to other intensive cardiac rehab programs and that it has a very large focus on exercise, particularly routine exercise, as well as different coping strategies for stress and other risk factor modification. In order for any intensive cardiac rehab program to get CMS approval, it has to show a statistically significant reduction in at least five of the following six categories. LDL triglycerides, weight, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure or a reduction and medications needed to control blood pressure, cholesterol or diabetes. And Pritikin showed that it excelled in all six of those categories. Because of this, we have high hopes that prediction is not only going to be very effective for patients but also cost effective in the long run for a health system.
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