Take a deep breath and watch blood pressure fall
Quick results come from yogic breathing
Take a deep breath. Let all your worries float away. Sound like a Ameritrade commercial? Instead, it might be a powerful tool to help your patients lower their blood pressure.
Researchers at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo found that people with normal blood pressure can use yogic breathing to return their systolic blood pressure to normal within 2.7 minutes after a mentally stressful situation.
"There are obvious implications for those with hypertension, and that’s an area that needs to be studied," says Bong H. Sung, PhD, a research associate professor at SUNY-Buffalo.
Sung, who practices yogic deep breathing, presented the results of her study at a meeting of the American Society of Hypertension in New York City in May.
She recruited 12 individuals, ages 22 to 55, all with normal blood pressure and subjected them to a five-minute challenge: a difficult mathematics problem designed to produce mental stress. Heart rates and blood pressure were measured during the challenge to gauge stress levels.
Sung found that systolic blood pressure returned to normal in 3.7 minutes with no intervention, but with yogic breathing, normal blood pressure was achieved in 2.7 minutes, "a significant reduction in time," Sung says.
Classical music brought systolic down in 2.9 minutes and nature sounds in 3.0 minutes, Sung said.
There was no significant reduction in heart rate recovery with any of the techniques, Sung and her colleagues concluded.
Yogic breathing has a clear effect on blood pressure for patients who visit the offices of holistic practitioner Jeff Migdow, MD, on the grounds of Kripalu Center in Lenox, MA.
Migdow, author of Breathe In, Breathe Out, (Time Life; 1999) says blood pressure is "almost always higher in the doctor’s office than it would be in day-to-day life."
Migdow says any patient who shows a high reading gets a second reading 10 minutes later. "Even without intervention, blood pressure is almost always three to five points lower the second time," he says.
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