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Can Stress Management Help Prevent Hypertension? When people get older, their systolic blood pressure (the top number in the blood pressure) reading tends to rise and their diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) often drops. This condition is known as isolated systolic hypertension. There are up to three-quarters of elderly people who have isolated systolic hypertension. As such, this is a very difficult task for the doctors to treat these people effectively as there is always a risk of lowering diastolic blood pressure too much given the fact that many elderly people frequently take multiple medications. Hypertension (high blood pressure) is a known risk factor for heart disease, and it could cause stroke, kidney failure, and even heart attack. A study found that learning stress management techniques could help people with this type of condition commonly among the elderly to eliminate their need for antihypertensive medications.
In the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine in April 2008, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston revealed that individuals with such condition, who participated in relaxation training, had a better chance of dropping at least one of their antihypertensive drugs than individuals in a control group who did not participate in relaxation training. A total of 122 hypertensive men and women aged 55 and older were randomized to 8 weeks of relaxation response training or a control group. All these participants were taking at least 2 antihypertensive drugs at the beginning of the study.Those participated in the relaxation response group were required to take part in weekly sessions including 15 minutes of instruction in how to produce the response (such as mindfulness meditation and deep breathing), and a guided 20-minute relaxation response session. They were also asked to listen to a 20-minute relaxation response tape on a daily basis. On the other hand, participants in the control group were instructed to listen to a series of 20-minute tapes of instructions on lifestyle modification techniques. After 8 weeks, 44 people in the relaxation response group and 36 in the control group had reduced their blood pressure to target levels. They were eligible for an additional 8 weeks of training including supervised antihypertensive medication elimination. It was found that 32 percent of the study participants in the relaxation group were able to keep their blood pressure at the recommended level while doing away with one or more of their antihypertensive drugs, comparing with 14 percent of those in the control group. After controlling for various characteristics of people in each group, the researchers found that people in the relaxation response group had a higher chance of dropping at least one medication by more than 4-fold. If similar findings can be confirmed with other types of high blood pressure, there will no doubt be huge benefits in preventing heart disease, heart attack, kidney failure, stroke and other diseases arising from hypertension as well as the reduced spending on medications.
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