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Health
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At
Yale ... scientists studied 119 men and 40 women who were undergoing coronary
angiography, an x-ray movie that shows As early as the 1970's, medical research has shown a strong correlation between lack of social support and heart disease. The emotional heart and the physical heart are linked. More and more, western medicine is finding that love and compassion may be some of the most important factors in preventing or reversing heart disease. In this sense, we may lag behind several Eastern traditions like Yoga and Buddhism which try to "open" the heart on many different levels. Dean Ornish, in his groundbreaking study, The Lifestyle Heart Trial, showed that a combination of dietary changes, aerobic exercise, yoga, meditation and support groups could actually reverse heart disease. His dietary and exercise recommendations caught on fast and hard. But the less quantifiable variable -- social support -- fell to the sidelines.
Ornish went on to write Love and Survival: The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy in 1998, citing a multitude of medical studies supporting the heart health/love link. Most western medical literature now acknowledges the critical role of "psychosocial" factors on cardiovascular health and the ability of those with cardiovascular disease to recover. Unlike earlier studies, more recent heart disease research has included women. A Swedish study found that women's cardiovascular health is more sensitive to factors like emotional support and family stress than is men's. The study concluded that women might gain more from "psychosocial" changes than men. And depression, significantly more prevalent in women, has been definitively linked to increased heart disease. "Physicians often tend to think that psychological factors are 'soft' in comparison with the traditional risk factors, perhaps because they are harder to quantify," says Thomas Pickering, MD DPhil in "Depression, Race, Hypertension, and the Heart" in The Journal of Clinical Hypertension. "But as noted ... depression was a better predictor of future hypertension in young blacks than "hard" measures such as baseline blood pressure and BMI [body mass index]. Pickering continues, "Finally, elevations in stress-related emotions (eg, depression, anxiety, low perceived social support) have been independently associated with morbidity and premature mortality after acute myocardial infarction," underscoring the importance of our emotional life with regard to our physical survival. Recent studies have shown that "even when the effects of smoking are controlled, depression remains a significant independent predictor of mortality among heart patients and stroke survivors." (Kennedy)
"There are also subtle, but important, variations in heart rate that are not detectable with routine electrocardiography. Heart rate variability, a measure of the moment-to-moment change in cardiac rhythm, reflects the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic tone ..." explains Gary J. Kennedy, MD in The Importance of Depression in Cardiovascular and Cerebrovascular Disease (Medscape). "The frequency associated with parasympathetic tone appears to protect against the emergence of arrhythmias. Loss of heart rate variability is associated with life-threatening cardiac arrhythmias." In other words a stable, balanced shift back and forth between heart rhythms associated with arousal and heart rhythms associated with relaxation keeps heartbeat healthy. The importance of heart rate variability is the keystone of research and training done at Heartmath in California. They have found that people can learn behaviors that improve heart rate variability. Reporting in Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine in 1996, they said that "positive emotions lead to alterations in heart rate variability that may be beneficial in the treatment of hypertension and reduce the likelihood of sudden death in patients with congestive heart failure and coronary artery disease." Perhaps no other physiological research gets to the heart of the matter more than Heartmath's study of The Role of Physiological Coherence in the Detection and Measurement of Cardiac Energy Exchange Between People presented at the Tenth International Congress on Stress in Montreux, Switzerland. Simply put, this study found that the touch or closeness of one person changed the "energy" field of another. The ECG (heart signal) registered on the EEG (brain signal) of the person being touched. "The fact that the heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field produced by the body, coupled with the discovery that this field becomes more coherent as the individual shifts to a loving or caring state, prompted us to investigate the possibility that the heart´s field may contribute to this energy exchange," explain authors McCraty, Atkinson and Tiller. The authors suggest that this "transfer of energy" from compassionate individual to individual provides one explanation for the effects of several healing modalities. This would certainly provide the basis for the most physiological explanation of our heart's need for love and compassion. In a culture where autonomy is highly valued, where extended family is the exception, where computers, cars, and satellite t.v. keep us isolated, where generation, class and race separate us .. heart disease is on the rise. Doctors can prescribe cholesterol lowering medication. Cardiac rehab programs can monitor us on treadmills. But healthcare providers and educators need to escape the trap of materialism. We need to accept that heart disease is a disease of the spirit as well as the body. Laura Wisniewski, Assoc. Ed. . ******* ******* If you would like to submit something for our Health & Med section, don't hesitate to let us know. Simply e-mail us at health@downstreetmagazine.com. The e-mail should contain your name, address, and a phone number where we can reach you. You may also send a copy of your proposed article. The text can either be included in the body of the e-mail, or you can send it as an attachment in just about any word processing format. If your piece is accepted, we will pay a small honorarium for your interest & your time. [See Freelancers Wanted for more details.] ******* ******* If you would like to advertise in this section, or throughout the magazine, please visit our Advertising Info Pages ... or call, write, or e-mail ads@downstreetmagazine.com. ******* ******* |
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