Stress-Busting Yoga Lowers Blood Pressure Too

Lowering blood pressure and relieving stress may be as simple as taking a deep breath, results of a study suggest.

According to preliminary findings presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hypertension meeting here, yoga in the form of controlled breathing lowered blood pressure in people who were subject to mental stress.

B.H. Sung and colleagues from Kaleida Health-Millard Fillmore Hospital in Buffalo, New York, measured whether yoga and listening to classical music or nature sounds could relieve stress. Twelve individuals aged 22 to 55 with normal blood pressure were subjected to a task that caused mental stress, for 5 minutes. Researchers measured increases in heart rate and blood pressure to gauge stress levels.

Results show that systolic blood pressure--the top number of a blood pressure reading which reflects blood pressure when the heart contracts--returned to normal in an average time of 3.7 minutes with no intervention. Deep breathing allowed the systolic pressure to return to normal in 2.7 minutes, a significant reduction in time.

Classical music brought systolic pressure down in 2.9 minutes and natural sounds in 3.0 minutes, investigators found. There was no significant reduction in heart rate recovery with any of the techniques, Sung and colleagues note.

A second study found that acupuncture and self-administered acupressure lowered blood pressure after 4 weeks in patients with essential hypertension, or high blood pressure with no known cause.

The investigators at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, compared the blood pressure readings in 7 people with essential hypertension who underwent 4 weeks of therapy, with readings from five people who were not treated.

People who received the alternative therapies had lower systolic blood pressure readings after 4 weeks, the findings indicate.

``These results suggest acupuncture and acupressure may be efficacious in decreasing arterial blood pressure in hypertensive patients,'' B. Lu and colleagues conclude.

Further studies will need to address the mechanism by which the therapies lower blood pressure, the researchers note.