Exercise compliance and the prevention of a recurrence of myocardial infarction.

Exercise compliance (three exercise sessions per week) has been shown to have a favorable effect upon prognosis (P less than 0.001) in 610 "post-coronary" patients followed for an average of 36.5 months. This cannot be explained entirely by mutual correlation of the data with other health habits (as indicated by smoking behavior) or disease severity (as indicated by angina, exercise-induced ST-segmental depression, cardiac enlargement, or ventricular aneurysm). Stratification of the data shows that in almost all categories of subject, sustained physical activity is associated with a five-fold improvement in the odds ratio for both fatal and non-fatal recurrences of the infarction.