Meditation halves heart patient death rate - study

A nine-year scientific study of the effects of meditation on heart patients showed the practice cut by half the rate of death, heart attack and stroke, according to results published recently The stress-reducing technique known as Transcendental Meditation has been hailed by celebrities such as actor Clint Eastwood, singer Paul McCartney and Hollywood director David Lynch.

The results published in the Archives of Internal Medicine provide hard data from the first long-term randomized clinical trial of its kind on the topic, funded by a $3.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“These findings are the strongest documented effects yet produced by a mind-body intervention on cardiovascular disease,” said lead author Robert Schneider, director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.

Health education

The trial was conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with Schneider’s institute.

Scientists tracked 201 African American men and women, with an average age 59 all of whom had narrowing of arteries in their hearts.

The subjects stayed on their current medication and were randomly assigned to either a meditation group or a control group that was given “conventional health education classes,” said the study.

Comparing the two groups, researchers found that those who practiced Transcendental Meditation decreased the likelihood of death, nonfatal heart attack and stroke by 47 percent.

People in the meditation group experienced significant drops in blood pressure, stress and anger, which could help explain the results, the researchers said.

Still, more work needs to be done to confirm the results in future studies, said co-author Theodore Kotchen, Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Stress-reduction

“Although provocative, these observations should be confirmed in African Americans as well as in other patient populations,” said Kotchen, pointing out that meditation is not a substitute for drug therapy in heart disease.

The findings point to the importance of stress-reduction in managing people’s health, said an accompanying editorial by C. Noel Bairey Merz, Director of the Women’s Heart Centre and the Preventive and Rehabilitative Cardiac Centre at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute.

“This study offers new hope that teaching patients how to effectively reduce psychosocial stress can improve health outcomes in more than 13 million patients with coronary heart disease,” Bairey Merz wrote.

“Cardiac rehab centers would do well to explore meditation as a treatment option.”

The technique was created by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, an Indian who became famous in the 1960s and 1970s as the guru to the Beatles. He died in 2008.

AFP