Yoga good for heart patients

9 November, 2007

Yoga is not only safe for patients with chronic heart failure but also helps reduce signs of inflammation often connected with death.

Dr Bobby Khan, lead researcher, and his colleagues at the Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, the United States, studied the addition of an 8-week course of yoga to standard medical therapy in a group of 19 heart-failure patients to see if such a regimen would be safe and beneficial.

They found that the yoga regimen reduced markers of inflammation associated with heart failure and also improved exercise tolerance and quality of life.

The findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida, the United States, on November 5, 2007.

It has been estimated that over 5 million people in the United States suffer from chronic heart failure – which is a long-term condition in which the heart fails to pump blood efficiently to the body’s other organs.

Health problems and deaths on account of heart failure are high despite widespread use of effective drug and device therapies to treat the condition, experts say.

According to the researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, “many people believe that the addition of yoga may be beneficial in cardiac rehabilitation. Furthermore, it may be that yoga has an impact on the mechanisms of action involved in the progression of heart failure.”

It was found that yoga was not only safe but also seemed to improve patients’ ability to exercise, lowered levels of inflammation, and improved overall quality of life.

The study threw up major differences in the levels of biological markers in the blood between patients who were provided yoga therapy and those who were provided standard medical therapy. Patients who were put on yoga therapy completed the regimen without complications.

In those patients who did yoga, there was a 26% drop in symptoms on a standard assessment that measures quality of life in heart-failure patients, compared to a 3% decrease for those patients put on medical therapy alone.

Dr Nieca Goldberg, a professor of medicine at New York University, who prescribes both yoga and tai chi, a Chinese martial art, to patients with heart failure and heart attack, said at the meeting of the American Heart Association, “Yoga is aerobic. Hence it is not surprising, in terms of its effects on the inflammatory markers.”

Heart-failure patients, Dr Goldberg added, often have trouble with exercise due to fatigue and shortness of breath caused by the heart’s reduced pumping ability. Yoga, considered to be 5,000 years old, is a safe form of exercise and it improves the quality of their lives.

Dr Srinivas Murali, medical director of the division of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, the United States, observed that yoga certainly holds promise as a non-medical treatment, especially so since it offers an easy way to a healthier lifestyle.