Patients with congestive heart failure may improve their quality of life by practicing transcendental meditation, results of a US study suggest.
Heart failure is a gradually worsening condition in which a weakened heart is not able to pump blood effectively around the body. People with heart failure find it increasingly difficult to perform daily tasks involving physical effort and, as a result, they may become dependent on other people, experience a reduced quality of life and become depressed.
To see whether transcendental meditation may reduce some of these symptoms, Dr Ravishankar Jayadevappa, from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and colleagues studied 23 African–American men and women, aged 55 years or older, who had recently been admitted to hospital with heart failure.
Half the patients were taught a transcendental meditation technique, which helps relieve stress and induce relaxation and calmness, and were encouraged to practice it regularly. The remaining patients received no such tuition.
All the participants continued to take their recommended medications over the course of the study.
After 6 months, the team found that patients in the meditation group showed significantly greater improvements on a physical exercise test than the other participants.
Patients who practiced meditation also had lower levels of depression, visited the hospital less often and had a better overall quality of life compared with patients that did not practice meditation.
The researchers suggest that transcendental meditation may benefit heart failure patients by reducing the negative effects of stress on the heart.
Dr Jayadevappa concluded: "The results of this study indicate that transcendental meditation can be effective in improving the functional capacity and quality of life of congestive heart failure patients."
As a result of the findings, the researchers now intended to conduct a larger, longer-term study into the benefits of meditation in heart failure patients.
The research is published in the journal Ethnicity and Disease.