Strongest Study Yet Shows Meditation Can Lower Risk of Heart
Attack and Stroke
Most doctors say meditation can’t hurt you, but now there’s
reassuring evidence that it may help you as well when it comes to warding off
disease.
Previous studies have linked better health outcomes among
heart patients who practiced meditation compared to those who did not, but none
of those trials could definitively credit the brain-focusing program with the
better health results. In the latest trial to address those limitations,
however, meditation does appear to have an effect on reducing heart attack,
stroke and even early death from heart disease, at least among African-Americans.
“The main finding [of our research] is that, added on top of
usual medical care, intervention with a mind-body technique -meditation - can
have a major effect on cardiovascular events,” says Robert Schneider, lead
author on the study published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and
Outcomes and a professor.
He and his colleagues followed 201 African American men and
women, who are at higher risk of heart disease than whites, but who also had
addition reason to worry about heart attacks and strokes since they were also
diagnosed with coronary heart disease. The participants were randomly assigned
to participate in either a health education class about heart-friendly diet and
exercise, or to attend a meditation program. Meditation involves shutting out
the outside world and focusing thoughts inward, or resting while remaining
alert. All of the participants continued to receive their normal medical care
as well, including appropriate medication.
After roughly five years of follow-up, the researchers found
a 48% reduction in the overall risk of heart attack, stroke, and death from any
cause among members of the meditation group compared to those from the health
education group. The meditating group enjoyed an average drop of 4.9 mm Hg in
systolic blood pressure compared to the control group and also reported less
stress and less anger. “It’s like discovering a whole new class of medications,”
Schneider says of the power of meditation in improving the patients’ health.
But while the magnitude of those results is remarkable, the
study involved a relatively small number of participants, and did not reveal
how meditation may be lowering heart disease risk. On the surface, it’s
intuitively obvious that stress management can affect heart health for the
better; anxiety and stress cause blood pressure to shoot up and leave us on
edge, triggering spikes in heart-harming stress hormones like cortisol.
But many experts are skeptical of the alleged benefits of
techniques such as transcendental meditation that claim to reduce stress by a
substantial amount. In the past, these benefits have been hard to test
scientifically, largely because study participants who volunteered for
meditation programs may have been biased to see them succeed. Practitioners have
also made strong and essentially unsubstantiated claims about the powers of
meditation, leading heart experts and scientists to be especially skeptical. In
fact, in 2005, more than 500 brain researchers signed a petition (albeit an
unsuccessful one) to protest a scheduled lecture on the neuroscience of
meditation by the Buddhist spiritual icon, the Dalai Lama, at a major
conference organized by the Society for Neuroscience.
The great lengths to which the researchers of the
Circulation study went to make their trial scientifically rigorous, however,
should reinforce the results in the eyes of some skeptics. The scientists
adjusted for the effects of weight, smoking behavior, and diet, all of which
can influence heart attack, stroke and early heart death rates. And while the
participants in both groups exercised more and cut back on alcohol during the
study, they did so at similar rates, making these changes unlikely to be
responsible for the differences in health outcomes either.
While the findings aren’t likely to resolve questions over
whether meditation should become a standard part of heart disease care, the
results should give more doctors confidence in discussing the practice with
their patients and giving them some scientifically based information that’s an
improvement over the advice that “it can’t hurt to try.”
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