Background: The effectiveness of exercise in managing cardiovascular (CV) health and function is well established. Less clear is the process for optimising the safety and efficacy of an intervention, particularly how objective assessments might inform this process.
Objective: The aim of this review was to investigate the cited evidence underpinning recommendations for assessing CV function to inform the safe and effective prescription of exercise in populations with established CV disease, as published in documents to guide practice authored by prominent organisations in cardiology and sports medicine.
Methods: A systematic review of position statements and guiding documents on exercise prescription for CV health was conducted. Included documents were published between 1997 and 2016.
Results: Following removal of duplicates, 3158 documents were considered, with full-text screening required for 334. Twenty-seven documents were included which provided 106 individual recommendations for specific objective assessments. Of the total number of recommendations, 60% had no accompanying citation and 28% of recommendations provided citations that did not directly support the statement made. Additionally, 52% of included documents did not state the methods of document development. That is, it was not clear if there was a literature review and/or expert consensus that was used to form recommendations included within.
Conclusion: Almost no cited evidence underpinning the extracted recommendations from the included guiding documents, nor any acknowledgement of this deficiency was established. There were limited explanations found for the methods involved in developing such guiding documents.