Study: Exercise offers little help for heart patients

    NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Exercise can do a lot of good for many people, but it apparently doesn’t do much for patients with heart failure.
    A new study finds that exercise failed to deliver on the main goal: keeping people out of the hospital and improving their survival rates. Doctors who adjusted for certain factors, however, did find that exercise can offer some patients a modest but significant benefit.
    Exercise has long been known to prevent heart disease and help heart attack patients recover. But previous studies have reached conflicting findings about whether it helps heart failure patients—or even is safe for them.
    The results were released at an American Heart Association conference.
    About 5 million Americans have heart failure. It kills more than 300,000 of them and accounts for a million hospitalizations each year.

    On the Net:
    Heart meeting: http://www.americanheart.org
    Heart failure: http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/dci/Diseases/Hf/HF-WhatIs.html