JMIR Cardio
Cardiovascular medicine with focus on electronic, mobile, and digital health approaches in cardiology and for cardiovascular health
Editor-in-Chief: Gunther Eysenbach, MD, MPH, FACMI
Recent Articles

Physical activity (PA) can reduce cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors, and although primary care settings offer a large reach to promote PA and reduce CVD risk, primary health care professionals may lack self-efficacy and tools to effectively promote PA in practice. Movement as Medicine for CVD Prevention is a suite of 2 theory-based, web-based behavioral interventions—one for health care professionals and one for patients—which may offer a pathway for promoting PA and reducing CVD risk in primary care.


Antithrombotic therapy is complex and requires informed decisions and high therapy adherence. Several mobile phone apps exist to either support physicians in the management of antithrombotic therapies or to educate and support patients. For the majority of these apps, both their medical evidence and their development background are unknown.

Patients with single ventricle heart defects receive 3 stages of operations culminating in the Fontan procedure. During the Fontan procedure, a vascular graft is sutured between the inferior vena cava and pulmonary artery to divert deoxygenated blood flow to the lungs via passive flow. Customizing the graft configuration can maximize the long-term benefits. However, planning patient-specific procedures has several challenges, including the ability for physicians to customize grafts and evaluate their hemodynamic performance.

Acute myocardial infarction may be associated with new-onset arrhythmias. Patients with myocardial infarction may manifest serious arrhythmias such as ventricular tachyarrhythmias or atrial fibrillation. Frequent, prolonged electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring can prevent devastating outcomes caused by these arrhythmias.

In patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD), knowledge about the associations among changes in depressive symptoms, self-efficacy, and self-care activities has been requested. This is because such knowledge can be helpful in the design of behavioral interventions aimed to improve self-efficacy, reduce depressive symptoms, and improve performance of self-care activities in CVD patients.

Mobile apps have the potential to support patients with heart failure and facilitate disease self-management, but this area of research is recent and rapidly evolving, with inconsistent results for efficacy. So far, most of the published studies evaluated the feasibility of a specific app or assessed the quality of apps available in app stores. Research is needed to explore patients’ and clinicians’ perspectives to guide app development, evaluation, and implementation into models of care.


Adult chronic heart failure mainly affects an elderly population with multiple comorbidities that often require frequent medical visits to prevent poor health outcomes. However, the heart failure disease process reduces their independence by reducing mobility, exercise tolerance, and cognitive decline. Remote care technologies can bridge the gap in care for these patients by allowing them to be followed up within the comfort of their home and encourage their self-care. However, patients, carers, and health care professionals need to engage with the technology for it to be useful.
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