A collaborative group was established, coordinated from the
Heart Failure Unit of the Imperial College School of Medicine,
London. A prospective protocol was written and agreed by the
collaborative group before data collection, specifying the
methods to be used, the main prespecified analyses, and a
common dataset of collected variables.
We searched Medline for randomised controlled trials since
1990 of exercise training in patients with chronic congestive
heart failure or left ventricular dysfunction. We cross checked
our findings to identify any other published or unpublished trials
by consulting researchers and colleagues in exercise physiology
and heart failure and by scrutinising reference lists from review
articles, and abstracts presented at scientific sessions and
published in Circulation, the Journal of the American College of Cardiology,
and the European Heart Journal. A subsequent search of
the Cochrane Reviews database yielded no additional studies.