Transcendental Meditation Good for Heart Failure

Preliminary research conducted in the US suggests transcendental mediation might help people with heart failure in improving their mental and physical health. The findings of the research are published in the journal Ethnicity & Disease.

Transcendental Meditation (TM) is a form of meditation wherein the practitioner sits comfortably, closes his/her eyes and silently repeats a mantra. The mantra can be a sound, word or phrase that calms the mind and body.

Some researchers are of the belief that this kind of meditation not only relaxes the mind and body but also affects the nervous system in a particular way. This effect brings about changes in a range of bodily functions including breathing, blood vessel dilation and stress hormone regulation.

Earlier studies have found links between TM and improvement in high blood pressure as well as certain other heart disease risk factors. However none of these studies had concentrated specifically on the effects of TM on heart failure in African Americans, a group that is particularly at risk.

For confirming these effects, researchers led by Dr. Ravishankar Jayadevappa from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia conducted their study with 23 African Americans. All the study subjects were aged 55 or older and had mild to moderate heart failure.

The subjects had been recently hospitalized for mild to moderate heart failure. This is a chronic condition wherein the heart slowly but surely loses its strength to pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs.

The lack of blood causes shortness of breath, fatigue, and restricts the patient from indulging in physical activity. Normal treatment for heart failure includes exercises and medications to lighten the workload on the heart and also slow the progression of the disease.

For the new research, Dr. Jayadevappa’s team randomly assigned the study subjects to either practice TM or receive health education. Both groups were also given standard heart failure treatment. The subjects assigned to learn TM were first taught the techniques and then were instructed to practice it daily on their own. All subjects were followed up after six months. The researchers found that those who learned the transcendental meditation technique improved in their average performance on the six-minute walk test. This is the standard method of measuring exercise capacity among heart patients.

The TM patients not only gained in their ability to exercise but improvements were also noted in their quality of life and depression symptoms as compared to those in the health education group.

“The results are ‘encouraging’,” concluded the researchers. However they feel that larger and longer studies replicating the findings are necessary for confirming without doubt that TM offers long term benefits to heart failure patients.
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