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WESTPORT, May 20 1996 (ReutersHealth Information story)
Transcendental Meditation Improves Exercise Tolerance In CAD Patients Patients with coronary artery disease who participated in an eight-month transcendental meditation program exhibited improved exercise tolerance and a delay in onset of ST segment changes on electrocardiogram with exercise compared with controls. Results of the study are published in a recent issue of The American Journal of Cardiology. Dr. John Zamarra of the State University of New York at Buffalo and colleagues there, at the VA Hospital in Buffalo and at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, randomized 21 patients with coronary artery disease to a program of transcendental meditation, twenty minutes twice a day, or to a place on a "waiting list" for the same program that was to start eight months later at the end of the randomized trial. Dr. Zamarra reports that patients who practiced TM had a 14.7% increase in exercise tolerance, an 11.7% increase in maximal workload and an 18% delay in onset of ST segment depression with exercise compared with wait-listed controls. Dr. Zarmarra comments that: "From the traditional Vedic perspective, TM practice enlivens an integrated set of physiologic self-referral and homeostatic mechanisms that enhances a more coherent style of functioning in the psychoneurophysiology." Am. J. Card. 1996; 77:867-870. Reprinted with permission of Reuters Health Information, November 1997. |
