Skip to: Main Navigation | Main Content
or try the A-Z Library
Reducing stress, through exercise or specific stress management training, results in better heart outcomes for people with heart disease than if they just have usual care from their doctor.
21 04 2005
There's quite good evidence that stress is involved in heart disease. But when people have studied stress reduction, it hasn't had much effect on people's chances of, say a heart attack. Some experts claim that's because stress wasn't effectively reduced.
Now a small study has looked at people with existing heart disease who are at high risk of a heart attack or stroke and compared aerobic exercise, stress management training, and usual care from their doctors.
The exercise training was for 35 minutes three times a week for four months. The stress management sessions were for an hour and a half once a week.
It turned out that there wasn't much difference between the exercise group and the group having stress management training. They were both better than usual care alone on several tests such as; depression, how healthy the heart beat was, how dilatable the arteries were, and whether when participants were deliberately stressed it had a damaging effect on the heart.
Apart from fitness where, as you'd expect, exercise was better, both types of training worked as well as each other. Whether this would translate into fewer heart attacks or strokes though is impossible to say at this stage.
Title: Journal of the American Medical Association
Author: Blumenthal JA et al, Effects of exercise and stress management training on markers of cardiovascular risk in patients with ischemic heart disease.