Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

In the last 20 years, we have witnessed older patients being offered heart surgery who would have been deemed too sick for an operation in the past. While newer procedures have made operations safer, many older patients undergoing heart surgery are considered frail and do not recover from their procedure as well as they should. This frailty is mostly due to muscle weakness and physical inactivity and we have identified that about 50% of older patients who need heart surgery are considered frail. Therefore, the healthcare team needs to develop strategies to help frail, elderly patients improve their recovery after heart surgery. There is research suggesting that physical activity before heart surgery improves a patient's outcomes after surgery. In fact, we have recently completed a pilot research study to demonstrate that offering exercise therapy and education sessions before their heart operation is safe and feasible for younger patients. However, the current standard of care does not offer this type of program for any patients while they wait for heart surgery. Patients can wait up to 4 months for heart surgery and they are often sedentary because they fear that physical activity would make their condition worse. This is an issue, particularly for frail older patients who are undergoing surgery because they are in a worse health condition than less frail patients. We are now performing a larger research study across Canada in frail older patients who may benefit the most from becoming more active as they wait for their procedure. We believe that this study is of utmost importance because of the increasing burden of heart disease in frail older patients who have few supports to live a healthier, more physically active lifestyle before surgery. Our goal with this research study is to improve the health of higher risk, older patients so that they do not just survive but thrive after their heart surgery.