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How to Have a Healthy Heart / Stress Management May Help Heart Disease Patients
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Adding stress management to routine heart disease treatment might lessen some patients' long-term risk of complications.
A 5-year study of men with heart disease showed that those who went through 4 months of stress management training were less likely to need a heart procedure such as bypass surgery over the study period.
Overall, few of the 94 men in the study had a heart attack, and only one died. But in the study's first year, two men who received only standard care had a heart attack, while none in the stress reduction group did.
And despite the added cost of stress management training, patients in this group had lower hospitalization and physicians' costs over 5 years than men in the standard care group did. Costs in the exercise group were similar to the stress reduction group's.
These findings confirm the added value of stress management training to usual medical care, and indicate that such training is associated with fewer adverse cardiac events and less medical expenditures.
The study's stress management was geared specifically to heart patients, providing information on heart disease and its risk factors as well as techniques for lowering stress.
Men in the stress management group went through 16 small-group sessions that provided them with ways to control negative emotions and thoughts, techniques for muscle relaxation and other stress-calming tactics.
Patients did not enter this study "complaining of stress"--which suggests heart disease patients need not feel stress is a problem to benefit from stress management.
American Journal of Cardiology January 15, 2002;89 Dr Farr's Comment:
This, of course, is not new information. But the evidence is quite loud and clear. Stress likely causes more heart attack deaths then high cholesterol and smoking combined.
Yet our country spends many tens of billions of dollars on drugs to lower their cholesterol and virtually ignores stress management tools.
There are certainly many effective ways to address this stress. If stress evolves from psychosomatic causes then your should take a free personality test.
If the stress is physiologically induced, i.e. from malfunction of various organ systems, then you can find that out by taking one of our free tests.
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