Yoga and meditation have been practiced for centuries on end mainly because of the sense of well-being that it offers to practitioners besides offering benefits to one’s physical and mental states.
Now, a new US review has found that transcendental meditation produces a significant reduction in high blood pressure.
This review was conducted by the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, and the University Of Kentucky College Of Medicine in Lexington refutes a report that was published in July this year by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine.
This report found little evidence that any specific stress reduction could effectively lower blood pressure.
Now the review co-author Dr. James Anderson of the University of Kentucky said that the new meta-analysis identified all high quality meditation studies published through 2006 and analyzes their effects, which incidentally the earlier report failed to do.
The new meta-analysis reviewed randomized, controlled trials of all stress reduction and relaxation methods in participants with high blood pressure published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
Blood pressure changes for the Transcendental Meditation technique included average reductions of 5 points on systolic blood pressure and 2.8 on diastolic blood pressure, which were statistically significant, but other stress reduction programs did not show significant changes in blood pressure, the review said.