Stress management programs like Transcendental Meditation should be implemented to significantly reduce depression, heart attacks, strokes and deaths in coronary heart disease patients, according to a new editorial written by a Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute physician, C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, and published in Archives of Internal Medicine.
C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, Director of the Women's Heart Center and the Preventive and REhavilitative Cardiac Center at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute, is available to discuss her noteworthy editorial in Archives of Internal Medicine. Bairey Merz is calling upon medical centers to institute stress management programs to reduce deaths in heart patients.
Effective stress management programs could be as effective as beta-blocker drugs in improving health outcomes for the more than 13 million coronary heart disease patients in the U.S., according to Bairey Merz' editorial.
The commentary is in response to new, nine-year, randomized, controlled clinical trial that concluded coronary heart disease patients who practiced the stress-reducing TranscendentalMeditation® technique had nearly 50 percent lower rates of death, heart attack, and stroke compared to controls in a health education group. The study, also published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, was conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa.
Source: Cedars-Sinai Medical Center