Can Meditation Help Cut Heart Disease Risk?

Being a 7000-year-old practice, meditation is a technique used to achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm state by focusing the mind on a particular object, thought or activity. Meditation may be employed to reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and pain, and increase peace, perception and wellbeing. Stress is a risk factor for heart disease. 

Research on meditation and cardiovascular health is limited, but some studies did suggest that meditation may boost the defense against heart disease. In fact, there is some evidence that meditation may speed up activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is involved in lowering blood pressure and heart rate during periods of relaxation.

According to a scientific statement from the American Heart Association (AHA) published September 28, 2017 in the ‘Journal of the American Heart Association’, the studies on meditation suggest a possible benefit of meditation on heart disease risk reduction.

The attention was focused on the effects of various sitting meditation practices, including mindful meditation, Samatha, Zen meditation, and transcendental meditation, and excluding combined mind-body practices like yoga and Tai Chi. This is because the physical activity involved in such practices has already been shown to benefit heart disease risk.

In their review of previously published studies, researchers found that meditation is associated with reduced stress, anxiety, and depression and improved sleep quality and general wellbeing. The researchers also reported that meditation may also help to lower high blood pressure, help people who smoke quit, and may help lower heart attack risk. 

One of the studies being reviewed involved 201 people with coronary artery disease participated in either a transcendental meditation program or a health education program. Transcendental meditation is a type of meditation that involves sitting with the eyes closed and repeating a mantra. After about 5 years, mortality and the number of heart attacks or strokes was significantly lower in those in the meditation group.

While the findings suggested that meditation has a possible benefit on cardiovascular risk, researchers emphasize that more high-quality, large-scale clinical trials is needed before any conclusions can be made.

Nevertheless, as stated by the researchers, meditation may be a low-cost, low-risk practice that can be used together with conventional strategies like diet, exercise, and other lifestyle modifications.

Generally, other health experts not involving in the study agree that meditation may help lower the risk of heart disease by countering the impact of stress on the body. When people are under stress, their fight or flight response can be triggered, leading to a release of stress hormones and spikes in blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen consumption and a release of inflammatory chemicals in the body. Meditation can trigger the opposite of a fight or flight response, encouraging the body to slow down and improving risk factors for heart disease like metabolic problems or inflammation.

Would Meditation Help Heart Disease Patients?

Any practice in which the practitioner trains his or her minds or self-induces a mode of consciousness can be called meditation. As it is generally an inwardly oriented, personal practice, people can usually practice it by themselves. While meditation has been practiced since thousands of years ago for various reasons, it is now commonly used for relaxation and stress reduction.

Since 1960s, meditation has been the subject of scientific research. There were more than 1,000 published studies that linked various methods of meditation to changes in bodily processes including metabolism, blood pressure, and brain activation.

Meanwhile, popularity of meditation has grown steadily. A 2007 study by the United States government found that about 9.4 percent of adults (over 20 million) had practiced meditation within the past 12 years, up from 7.6 percent (more than 15 million people) in 2002.

In a paper published on June 27, 2011 in the ‘Archives of Internal Medicine’, researchers from the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa reported that meditation would cut the rate of death, heart attack and stroke by half.

The 9-year study on the effects of meditation of heart disease patients was funded by the National Institute of Health, and the stress-reducing technique used is Transcendental Meditation.

Trial was conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with Schneider’s Institute. The study tracked 201 African American men and women, with an average age of 59. These participants had narrowing of arteries in their hearts. While staying on the prescribed medications, they were randomly assigned to either a meditation group or a control group that was given conventional health education classes.

A comparison of results from the 2 groups showed that those who practiced Transcendental Meditation had the risk of death, nonfatal heart attack and stroke decreased by 47 percent. Significant drops in blood pressure, stress and anger found among people in the meditation group might help explain the results.

Researchers felt that more studies should be carried out to confirm the results. They also pointed out that meditation should not be a substitute for drug therapy for heart disease patients.

The study, nevertheless, highlights a hope that health conditions of heart disease patients could be improve if these patients are taught how to effectively reduce psychosocial stress.