A patient admitted to the hospital while waiting for a heart transplant faces a problem that has nothing to do with their heart. Every day spent in bed erodes muscle. Enough days, and the frailty score that determines transplant eligibility crosses a line, and the patient is no longer a candidate for the operation they were admitted to wait for.
Radha Gopalan, a heart transplant cardiologist at Banner University Medical Center Phoenix, built a gym on a telemetry floor to interrupt that sequence. The team began testing the approach in 2023, and the early results were presented in April at the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation meeting in Toronto.
