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YOGA LOWERS BP 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 in New york, 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 so could relieve stress,' Twelve
individuals aged 22 to 55 with normal blood pressure were subjected to a task that caused
mental stress, for five minutes.

Results show that systolic blood pressure 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- administrated 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 Centre In-Brooklyn, New York, compared the blood
pressure readings in seven people with essential hypertension who underwent four weeks of
therapy, with readings from five people who were not treated.

As reported in Business Line News Service