Counselling may prevent heart attacks

Professor Jonathan Golledge from James Cook University's College of Medicine and Dentistry led the study. He said that blocked leg arteries affect nearly one in five older Australians adults and are associated with a high risk of heart attack, stroke and death.

"We wanted to find out if four brief counselling sessions could encourage people with blocked leg arteries to walk, and examined this in a 200 patient randomised clinical trial," said Professor Golledge.

Just over half of the patients received two hour long face-to-face sessions and two 15-minute telephone sessions, encouraging them towards walking goals of 40-minutes three times a week.

"They were monitored both physically and mentally. The intervention did not significantly improve their daily step count or change conventional cardiovascular risk factors.

"The counselling did improve participants' quality of life and remarkably halved the risk of heart attack, stroke and death. This effect was associated with a reduction in participants' anxiety and depression."

He said a part of the counselling focused on assisting participants to understand and self-manage the challenges of exercising with the leg pain caused by blocked leg arteries.

"It's possible this led to more acceptance and reduced psychological distress, which then led to less perceived physical disability and pain, and so to an improved quality of life and reduced risk of cardiovascular events," said Professor Golledge.

He said the scientists believed it was the first randomised clinical trial to show that a physical activity counselling intervention was associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular events - a finding which needed to be validated in larger trials.

"If validated, this would be a completely novel approach to reducing cardiovascular risk, which we think is super exciting," said Professor Golledge.

He said the team are now combining this counselling approach with tele-health exercise sessions, which they hope will improve walking as well as quality of life and powerfully reduce the risk of cardiovascular events.

"We urgently want patients with blocked arteries to join our trial to see if this is effective. Please contact us if you have blocked leg arteries and would like to take part," said Professor Golledge.

For those interested in the taking part in the trial, please contact Professor Golledge at [email protected]