On the "wellness" front, there is talk out there about the relationship(s) between and among meditation, blood pressure (hypertension), yoga, and exercise. Someone is now marketing a machine that you can use to help you slow down your breathing to ten or fewer breaths per minute (average is more like 15 or so per minute); early indications are that using this machine daily might actually cause a very significant reduction in blood pressure for the rest of the day (in other words, not just while you are practicing the slow breathing, or immediately thereafter). Today I noticed a recent article about the research that apparently supports the use of such a device. Following are excerpts (link to the whole thing is at the bottom of this post):
Breathe deep to lower blood pressure
Research suggests slow breathing helps break down the salt we eat
Take a slow deep breath, then exhale just as slowly. Can you take fewer than 10 breaths a minute? Research suggests breathing that slowly for a few minutes a day is enough to help some people nudge down bad blood pressure.
Why would that brief interlude of calm really work? A scientist at the National Institutes of Health thinks how we breathe may hold a key to how the body regulates blood pressure — and that it has less to do with relaxation than with breaking down all that salt most of us eat.
Now Dr. David Anderson is trying to prove it, with the help of a special gadget that trains volunteers with hypertension to slow-breathe.
If he's right, the work could shed new light on the intersection between hypertension, stress and diet. "If you sit there under-breathing all day and you have a high salt intake, your kidneys may be less effective at getting rid of that salt than if you're out hiking in the woods," said Anderson, who heads research into behavior and hypertension at the NIH's National Institute on Aging.
An estimated 65 million Americans have high blood pressure, putting them at increased risk of heart attacks, strokes, kidney damage, blindness and dementia. Many don't know it. Hypertension is often called the silent killer, because patients may notice no symptoms until it already has done serious damage.
Enter breathing.
Meditation, yoga and similar relaxation techniques that incorporate slow, deep breathing have long been thought to aid blood pressure, although research to prove an effect has been spotty.
Then in 2002, the Food and Drug Administration cleared the nonprescription sale of a medical device called RESPeRATE, to help lower blood pressure by pacing breathing. The Internet-sold device counts breaths by sensing chest or abdominal movement, and sounds gradually slowing chimes that signal when to inhale and exhale. Users follow the tone until their breathing slows from the usual 16 to 19 breaths a minute to 10 or fewer.
In clinical trials funded by maker InterCure Inc., people who used the slow-breathing device for 15 minutes a day for two months saw their blood pressure drop 10 to 15 points. It's not supposed to be a substitute for diet, exercise or medication, but an addition to standard treatment. Why slow-breathing works "is still a bit of a black box," says Dr. William J. Elliott of Chicago's Rush University Medical Center, who headed some of that research and was surprised at the effect.
When under chronic stress, people tend to take shallow breaths and unconsciously hold them, what Anderson calls inhibitory breathing. Holding a breath diverts more blood to the brain to increase alertness — good if the boss is yelling — but it knocks off kilter the blood's chemical balance. More acidic blood in turn makes the kidneys less efficient at pumping out sodium.
In animals, Anderson's experiments have shown that inhibitory breathing delays salt excretion enough to raise blood pressure. Now he's testing if better breathing helps people reverse that effect.
"They may be changing their blood gases and the way their kidneys are regulating salt," he says.
If Anderson's right, it would offer another explanation for why hypertension is what he calls "a disease of civilization and a sedentary lifestyle."
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14122841/
0 comments:
Post a Comment