Body Composition of Individuals With Cardiovascular Diseases

Introduction: Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in the world, thus, rehabilitation programs are essential to improve symptoms and reduce mortality. Virtual reality presents itself as a new alternative of therapeutic resource, stimulating the practice of physical activity through interaction between man and machine, based on the use of games and virtual environments. Objective: To compare the body composition of individuals with cardiovascular diseases submitted to conventional cardiac or virtual reality rehabilitation. Methods: Twenty-four individuals with cardiovascular diseases, divided into a conventional rehabilitation group (GRC) or virtual reality rehabilitation group (GRV), will be evaluated, and undergo a rehabilitation program for a period of 8 weeks, with two weekly sessions lasting 60 minutes. For the GRV training, the Xbox 360® from Microsoft with Kinect™ will be used with the games YourShape™ (Fitness Evolved) and Dance Central 3™. For the GRC training, treadmills (embreex) will be used to perform the aerobic training and free weights and weight training equipment to perform the resistance training. Food frequency will be evaluated by means of the Food Frequency Questionnaire, food consumption by the 24-hour food recall, body composition by bioimpedance, and functional capacity by the six-minute walk test. For analysis of data normality the Shapiro Wilk test will be applied. For paired analysis, the Student's T test will be performed in case of normal distribution or the Wilcoxon test for variables that do not follow Gaussian distribution. The intergroup comparisons will be analyzed through absolute variation before and after the interventions and the unpaired Student's T test or Mann Whitney test applied according to the normality of the data. The level of significance adopted will be 5%.