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Cardiovascular Response to Exercise
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Gerald F. Fletcher; ed. 446 pages. Mount Kisco, New York. Futura Publishing Company, Inc.; 1994. $75.00.
Exercise is an increasingly popular activity that has widespread and important implications for cardiovascular health and disease. Correspondingly, medical library shelves are filled with books detailing the relation between exercise and the heart. Some of these books are epidemiologically oriented (examining exercise as a cardiac risk-modifier, for example), some focus on exercise as a diagnostic tool (as in stress testing), and some center on exercise as a therapeutic tool (as in cardiac rehabilitation). Most exercise books touch generally on all of these areas but essentially devote space to describing the physiologic cardiovascular response to exercise. Most of these books were published in the 1970s and 1980s, and most are multiauthor texts. What does Cardiovascular Response to Exercise contribute to this field?
Breaking away from the traditional focus and organization found in earlier texts, this book is devoted in large part to in-depth presentations of cardiovascular exercise physiology and molecular biology. These sections are well written by experts in the field, although the multiauthor format results in some overlap and redundancy. Although these sections do not always address exercise studies per se, they do describe principles of myocardial cellular response to stimuli; these descriptions are a welcome and timely addition to the field.
Less than 30% of the text addresses clinical applications of exercise, such as diagnostic testing and therapeutics. These chapters do not provide a concise, comprehensive summary of clinical applications; thus, this book is not a general exercise reference text for the practicing clinician. A unique section on exercise as a trigger of cardiac events is included. Although timely and new, this section also has significant redundancies.
Editor Fletcher states that this book provides a broad base of information for the application of exercise in patients with cardiovascular disease. Although the information in the book is indeed broad based, it is not presented in a unified or applied fashion, and thus I must disagree with Fletcher's statement. He also suggests that the content of the book will help further basic and clinical research in the area of exercise and cardiovascular disease and health. I concur and believe that this is the greatest strength of this new text. Anyone wishing to be up to date in 1994 in the cellular, genetic, and physiologic cardiovascular response to exercise should read this book.
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