Meditation and Heart Disease

Meditation slashes risk of heart attack, stroke and death in heart disease patients by half

ranscendental Meditation (TM) first became well-known in the U.S. during the 1960s when the Beatles showed interest in studying the stress-reducing technique. But meditation hasn’t gone the way of love beads and flower power since then. In fact, various techniques, including TM, have received serious scientific scrutiny and researchers have documented many health benefits of meditation.

Now a $3.8 million study funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has reached a first-ever finding: patients with coronary heart disease who practiced TM had a nearly 50 percent lower rate of heart attack, stroke, and death compared to a matched group that didn’t meditate.

he results of the study, which was conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, were presented recently at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida. “Previous research on Transcendental Meditation has shown reductions in blood pressure, psychological stress, and other risk factors for heart disease, irrespective of ethnicity,” Robert Schneider, M.D., the study’s lead author and director of the Center for Natural Medicine and Prevention, said in a statement to the media. “But 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.”

The randomized controlled trial followed 201 African American men and women for nine years. The research subjects had an average age of 59 and all were diagnosed with narrowing of arteries in their hearts. The study participants continued taking their regular medications and continued other usual medical care during the study. But half were randomly assigned to a group that practiced stress reducing TM and the other half were placed in a non-meditating group that received health education classes covering standard cardiovascular risk factors.

In addition to a dramatic reduction in the risk of death, heart attacks, and strokes in the TM group, the researchers found a clinically significant reduction in blood pressure. Mediation also reduced psychological stress in a sub-group of patients who were experiencing high levels of anxiety and other signs of stress.

“This study is an example of the contribution of a lifestyle intervention — stress management — to the prevention of cardiovascular disease in high-risk patients,” Theodore Kotchen, M.D., co-author of the study and associate dean for clinical research at the Medical College, said in the press statement.

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One study, conducted in 1993, tested the effects of daily meditation on 77 Fibromyalgia patients. 51% of participants reported moderate to significant improvement in their symptoms.
In 1998, researchers studied the effects of meditation on FM. They found that meditative practices lessened the aches, sleeplessness, muscle pain, and depression experienced by people with this condition.

Another 1998 study revealed that people with CFS who used mind/body medicine practices such as meditation tripled their chances of improvement over a one year period, compared people with CFS who did not take engage in these practices.

Meditation Practice Can Boost Compassion for Living Beings

eople who practice meditating on feelings of compassion increase the activity of sections of the brain associated with empathy, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“There is such a thing as expertise when it comes to complex emotions or emotional skills, such as the one of cultivating benevolence,” said lead researcher Antoine Lutz. “That raises the possibility that you can train someone to cultivate this positive emotion.”

The researchers took functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the brains of 16 veteran meditators, including some Tibetan monks, and 16 people from the United States with no meditation experience. The novices were given basic training in meditation practice before beginning the study.

The fMRI scans measured the blood flow in participants’ brains as they either meditated or did not meditate on compassionate feelings while hearing a series of sounds designed to elicit emotional responses.

In the group of expert meditators, blood flow increased to the insula, associated with visceral emotional response, when the sound of a woman’s scream was played while they were meditating.

While they were not meditating, the experts still experienced more activity in the right temporal-parietal juncture than the novices did when hearing a woman scream or a baby laugh. This area of the brain is believed to play an essential function in helping interpret others’ emotions.

“The way you are going to understand the emotion of someone else is by somehow simulating, experiencing the emotion,” Lutz said. “It makes sense that we found some activation of the brain region which is critical for the experience of an emotion.”

The researchers are following up on their findings with a long-term study into whether and how the brain can be trained to experience empathy over time. In addition, they are studying whether different kinds of meditation, such as simple concentration vs. concentration on compassion, have different effects.

by: David Gutierrez Naturalnews