Meditate your way to a healthy heart

By Abigail Mellier, April 27th, 2013 | Health | 0 Comments

Meditation has always been associated with a calmer personality and better health as well. Researchers have found that transcendental meditation can actually help you keep your heart healthy by reducing high blood pressure.
The study by researchers at the Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention at the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, involved over 200 patients. The researchers report that high-risk patients who meditated were able to cut their risk of heart attacks, strokes and death from all causes by at least 50% as opposed to the control group, who were given conventional therapy including lifestyle tips to handle their disease.

“This is the first controlled clinical trial to show that long-term practice of this particular stress reduction program reduces the incidence of clinical cardiovascular events, that is heart attacks, strokes and mortality,” said Robert Schneider, the lead author and director of the Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention.

In the 100-odd patients who took up meditation in the study, there were 20 incidents of heart attacks, strokes and death as compared to 32 in the control group. Dr Schneider added that blood pressure reduction in the meditation group was also significant to the tune of 5 mm of Hg.

Another study involving college students had found that transcendental meditation helped reduce stress among the students consequently lowering their risk of high blood pressure. The details of the study are published in The American Journal of Hypertension.

Here 298 students were randomly assigned to either a meditation group or a waiting list. Those who took up meditation experienced an average reduction of systolic blood pressure by 6.3 millimeters of mercury and their diastolic pressure by 4 millimeters of mercury.

As the above studies indicate, there is a huge benefit from meditation as far as heart health is concerned. A big plus here is that it is not too difficult to learn meditation; just spend some time with it and you can actually help your heart.