Barcelona, 3 September 2006: Physical fitness is important to survival and a good health-related quality of life for patients with heart disease. While some exercise is perceived as being difficult, dance-hall dancing can improve physical capacity in heart patients much like other traditional training modalities, such as indoor cycling or aerobics. Ballroom dancing has the added benefits of being fun and social. It is an attractive option for many and provides a good incentive to exercise.
Benefits of physical training in patients with heart disease are well established. However, exercise compliance in this kind of patients is often inadequate, due in part to the fact that they find exercise boring. People like to dance, so we thought that dance-hall dancing could be an attractive option. Therefore, we carried out the Dancing for Cardiac Exercise Study (DanCE) at the National Institute of Cardiology “Ignacio Chavez”, in Mexico City. In this trial we randomly included 39 patients with heart disease in two groups: the dancing group (n=19) danced a routine designed by a professional dance teacher (who, by the way, is also a patient with cardiac valve disease). The rest of the patients exercised with a conventional indoor-cycling program.
A variety of dance music was chosen, including “salsa”, “rock & roll”, “Cuban danzon”, “blues”, according to the patient’s maximal exercise tolerance. The dancing and cycling training consisted of 30-minute routines for five days a week, over a four-weeks period. All patients were highly supervised during their training sessions by a cardiac rehabilitation specialized crew (physical therapist, nurse and cardiologist). Patients were supervised with continuous ECG-telemetry; blood pressure was measured several times during therapy and the presence of symptoms was assessed. As a complementary management, several cardiovascular risk factors were controlled using risk factors information lectures, relaxation therapy sessions, and nutritional advice. We measured the maximal physical fitness before and after this four week lapse in every patient with an exercise testing.
Our results showed that both groups reached a similar training effect. In particular, patients who danced increased their exercise capacity by about 28%. Almost the same effect was observed in those patients who trained with the conventional modality (gain of 31% of exercise capacity).
In conclusion, we think that dance-hall dancing can effectively improve physical fitness in patients with heart disease. We look forward to introduce this attractive way of exercising to heart disease patients. It is important to highlight that exercise capacity is closely related with the hazard of death. In other words, when an unfit person increases his physical capacity, the probability of death diminishes. So, move your body!