Cardiac disability. The impact of coronary heart disease on patients' daily activities.

We studied 100 men with clinically stable coronary heart disease. Their capacity for exertion as defined by treadmill test was compared with the physical and social avocational activities they carried out in their daily routine, as reported by them. Exercise capacity (treadmill time) was strongly correlated with a physician's independent assessment of symptomatic status (anginal history). Although participation in some relatively strenuous elective activities was related slightly to exercise capacity, participation in many household duties and social undertakings bore no relationship to exercise capacity or to other measures of the severity of the underlying heart disease. The patients' own perceptions of their cardiac limitation varied for different activities and for some activities it was determined as much by their own concern and outside advice as by cardiac symptoms. Decreased capacity for exertion seems to exert surprisingly little influence on a cardiac patient's daily routine and interventions aimed at altering one of these measures of performance will not necessarily affect the other.