RESUMEN
OBJECTIVES: To assess the effect of two different physical therapy interventions in patients with stable coronary heart disease and non-cardiac chest pain. METHODS: A randomized controlled trial was carried out at a university hospital in Norway. A total of 30 patients with known and stable coronary heart disease and self-reported persistent chest pain reproduced by palpation of intercostal trigger points were participating in the study. The intervention was deep friction massage and heat pack versus heat pack only. The primary outcome was pain intensity after the intervention period and 3 months after the last treatment session, measured by Visual Analogue Scale, 0 to 100. Secondary outcome was health-related quality of life. RESULTS: Treatment with deep friction massage and heat pack gave significant pain reduction compared to heat pack only (-17.6, 95% confidence interval: -30.5, -4.7; p < 0.01), and the reduction was persistent at 3 months' follow-up (-15.2, 95% confidence interval: -28.5, -1.8; p = 0.03). Health-related quality of life improved in all three domains in patients with no significant difference between groups. CONCLUSION: Deep friction massage combined with heat pack is an efficient treatment of musculoskeletal chest pain in patients with stable coronary heart disease.
RESUMEN
BACKGROUND: MacNew is a health-related quality of life (HQOL) inventory for patients with ischaemic heart disease and includes three domains; emotional, physical and social. The MacNew gives new opportunities to compare directly patients with the three major ischaemic heart diagnoses, angina, myocardial infarction and heart failure. However, this inventory has not earlier been evaluated in Norwegian. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to validate the Norwegian version of the disease-specific HQOL inventory MacNew by assessing the measurement model, internal consistent reliability and test-retest and convergent validity. METHOD: Patients with ischaemic heart disease (n=124; angina pectoris, n=53; myocardial infarction, n=35; and heart failure; n=36) participated in this cross-sectional study. Patients completed the self-administered MacNew and the generic HQOL-instrument SF-36. The MacNew and the SF-36 were repeated 2-3 weeks later (test-retest) by 17 patients. RESULTS: The psychometric properties were satisfactory to good. The construct validity assessed by factor analysis explained 61.5% of the variance. The internal consistent reliability was high (exceeded 0.90 in all domains). The test-retest analysis showed equivalent results demonstrating good reproducible properties. The convergent validity within each domain was evaluated with correlation analysis, demonstrating correlations of 0.74, 0.69 and 0.71 on the emotional, physical and social domains, respectively. CONCLUSION: The Norwegian version of the MacNew inventory demonstrated satisfactory to good psychometric properties and can be recommended for evaluating HQOL for patients with heart diseases in clinical studies.