Multidisciplinary intervention in frail elderly patients with cardiovascular diseases: a multicentre, single-blinded, randomised controlled trial

A hospital-initiated programme combining rehabilitation exercises, patient education, nutritional guidance, acupoint massage, and polypharmacy management significantly improved frailty status and physical function in elderly cardiovascular inpatients, according to results from a multicentre randomised controlled trial published in Nature Communications. The study, registered as ChiCTR1900022623, enrolled 333 frail patients aged 70 years or older who had been admitted to hospital with cardiovascular diseases and randomly assigned them to receive either the five-component intervention, known as the RENAP programme, or routine hospital care. At the twelve-month mark, patients in the intervention arm showed markedly better outcomes on both of the trial's primary measures than those receiving usual care, and the investigators reported no treatment-related serious adverse events during the follow-up period.

The trial addresses a persistent evidence gap in geriatric cardiology. Frailty, a state of diminished physiological reserve and heightened vulnerability to stressors, is common among older adults with cardiovascular disease and is associated with increased risks of disability, hospitalisation, and death. Clinicians have long observed that frail patients tolerate cardiac events, procedures, and even routine hospital admissions far less well than their robust peers: a fall, an infection, or a change in medication that a healthy older adult might shrug off can trigger a cascade of decline in someone whose reserves are already depleted. Although multidisciplinary care models have attracted growing interest as a way to counteract frailty, the authors note that robust evidence supporting their use specifically in elderly cardiovascular inpatients has remained limited. Most prior work has examined single-component interventions, such as exercise training or nutritional supplementation in isolation, whereas the RENAP programme was designed to test whether a coordinated package of care delivered from the hospital and sustained after discharge could produce measurable, durable benefits.

To answer that question, the research team, led by Ke Chai, Chen Meng, and colleagues across multiple participating institutions, designed a multicentre, single-blinded randomised controlled trial. Single-blinding in this context means that although participants and the clinicians delivering the intervention necessarily knew which care pathway was being provided, the investigators who assessed outcomes were blinded to group assignment, reducing the risk of measurement bias in the trial's key endpoints. This design feature matters because both primary outcomes in the trial rely partly on performance-based tests and symptom reporting, which can be influenced by assessor expectations. The study received financial support from the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, reflecting institutional investment in geriatric health services research in China, where the rapid ageing of the population has made the care of frail older patients an increasingly urgent priority for health planners.

Eligible participants were inpatients aged at least 70 years who met criteria for frailty and were being treated for cardiovascular diseases. In total, 166 patients were allocated to the RENAP programme and 167 to usual care. The five components of RENAP were selected to target the multiple, interacting factors thought to drive frailty in this population. Rehabilitation exercises aimed to rebuild muscle strength, balance, and endurance, addressing the sarcopenia, or age-related loss of muscle mass and function, that underlies many of the physical manifestations of frailty. Patient education sought to improve self-management and adherence, recognising that older patients with cardiac conditions often juggle complex regimens and lifestyle recommendations without adequate support. Nutritional guidance addressed the malnutrition and weight loss that frequently accompany frailty, since inadequate protein and energy intake accelerates muscle wasting and weakens immune function. Acupoint massage, a technique rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, was incorporated as a supportive therapy, reflecting the cultural context in which the trial was conducted and the interest in non-pharmacological approaches to symptoms such as fatigue, poor sleep, and low mood. Finally, polypharmacy management tackled the well-recognised hazards of multiple concurrent medications, including falls, cognitive impairment, and adverse drug interactions, which are especially prevalent in older cardiovascular patients who may take anticoagulants, antihypertensives, diuretics, and other agents simultaneously.

The investigators chose two primary outcomes, both measured as changes from baseline to twelve months. The first was the Fried Frailty Phenotype score, commonly abbreviated FFP, a widely used instrument that classifies frailty on the basis of characteristics such as unintentional weight loss, exhaustion, weakness, slow walking speed, and low physical activity. Developed in landmark cohort studies of community-dwelling older adults, the Fried phenotype has become a de facto standard for defining frailty in research, which makes it a meaningful yardstick for comparing results across trials. The second was the Short Physical Performance Battery, or SPPB, an objective assessment of lower-extremity function that evaluates balance, gait speed, and the ability to rise from a chair. Using two complementary measures, one capturing the frailty syndrome itself and the other quantifying tangible physical performance, allowed the trial to assess whether the intervention produced both a clinical and a functional benefit, and guarded against the possibility that an apparent improvement on one scale was an artefact of the measurement approach.

The results favoured the intervention on both endpoints. Patients receiving RENAP experienced a significantly greater improvement in FFP score than those receiving usual care, with an adjusted mean difference of −0.79 points on the frailty scale (95 percent confidence interval, −1.11 to −0.46; t(993) = −4.79; P < 0.001). On the SPPB, the intervention group again outperformed the control group, with an adjusted mean difference of 2.02 points (95 percent confidence interval, 1.04 to 2.99; t(993) = 4.06; P < 0.001). Because the confidence intervals for both differences exclude the null value and the P values are well below conventional significance thresholds, the findings provide strong statistical support for the conclusion that the multidisciplinary programme improved both frailty status and physical performance over the one-year follow-up period. The direction and magnitude of the SPPB difference are notable in a clinical sense, as changes of this size in physical performance batteries are generally considered meaningful for older adults and have been linked in prior research to reduced disability risk. In practical terms, a two-point gain on the SPPB can correspond to a patient moving from being unable to rise from a chair without using their arms to doing so unaided, or from a slow gait speed associated with high fall risk to a faster, safer walking pattern.

Safety data were reassuring. The authors report that no treatment-related serious adverse events were observed during the study, an important consideration for a population of very elderly patients with cardiovascular disease who might be vulnerable to exercise-related events, massage-related injury, or medication changes arising from deprescribing efforts. Concerns about the safety of exercise in cardiac patients have historically limited the ambition of rehabilitation programmes in this group, and deprescribing initiatives can occasionally provoke withdrawal effects or destabilise conditions that medications were controlling. The absence of such events suggests that the programme, as delivered in the trial, was not only effective but also tolerable for this high-risk group, which is a prerequisite for any serious consideration of broader implementation.

The investigators themselves are careful to frame the study's limitations. First, the trial was conducted in a single city, which raises questions about whether the results would generalise to other regions with different healthcare systems, staffing patterns, cultural attitudes toward interventions such as acupoint massage, or patient demographics. Second, the study experienced loss to follow-up, an almost unavoidable challenge in trials of frail elderly populations who may die, become hospitalised, or withdraw over a year of follow-up; attrition of this kind can introduce bias if it occurs unevenly between study arms, for instance if sicker patients in one group drop out at higher rates. The authors state explicitly that these factors may limit generalisability and warrant confirmation in broader healthcare settings. Additionally, as with any behavioural and lifestyle intervention, participants and treating clinicians could not be blinded, and the possibility that some component of the benefit derives from increased attention and contact time rather than the specific therapeutic elements cannot be excluded from the design alone. This so-called attention effect is a familiar challenge in rehabilitation research, and it underscores the value of the trial's objective performance measures, which are somewhat less susceptible to expectation-driven reporting than purely self-reported outcomes.

Even with those caveats, the trial carries substantial implications for clinical practice and health policy. Hospital discharge represents a critical window for older cardiovascular patients: admissions often accelerate functional decline, and patients who leave hospital frail are at elevated risk of readmission and further deterioration. Bed rest, deconditioning, disrupted meals, and medication changes during hospitalisation can each erode an older patient's physical reserves, and the transition home is frequently marked by confusion about follow-up instructions and rehabilitation plans. The RENAP findings suggest that a structured, multidisciplinary pathway initiated during hospitalisation and maintained over the following year can reverse, or at least substantially ameliorate, frailty in this population. Because the programme's components are relatively low-technology and rely on rehabilitation, education, dietary counselling, massage, and medication review rather than expensive devices or drugs, the model could plausibly be adapted to a range of care settings, although the resource requirements of coordinating five disciplines should not be understated. Delivering such a programme demands trained personnel, sustained follow-up infrastructure, and reimbursement mechanisms that reward post-discharge care rather than only acute treatment.

The study also contributes to a broader scientific conversation about whether frailty is modifiable. Frailty was long viewed as an irreversible consequence of ageing, but accumulating trials of exercise, nutrition, and comprehensive geriatric assessment have increasingly supported the view that the frailty trajectory can be altered, at least in some patients. By demonstrating benefits with a rigorously designed, blinded-outcome-assessment, multicentre randomised trial in a specifically cardiovascular population, this study strengthens the evidence base for multidisciplinary approaches and provides a template for future investigations. Questions that remain open include which of the five RENAP components contribute most to the observed benefit, whether the effects persist beyond twelve months, whether the programme reduces hard clinical endpoints such as mortality, hospitalisation, or disability over longer horizons, and how the intervention performs in rural settings, in different countries, and among patients with more advanced frailty or cognitive impairment. Answering these questions will likely require larger trials with longer follow-up, component-level analyses, and cost-effectiveness evaluations that health systems would need before committing resources at scale.