Practising yoga one or more times per week may help to lower blood pressure, according to a large observational study in the US.
About globally have high blood pressure, which increases the risk of having a heart attack or stroke. Physical activity is known to lower blood pressure not only聽during heartbeats (systolic pressure) but also in between beats (diastolic pressure).聽However, many people have trouble sticking to exercise regimes.
Yoga tends to be more sustainable than other forms of exercise because it is gentle on the joints, can be done with others and helps to relax the mind.
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Several have found that yoga lowers blood pressure, especially when it incorporates breathing exercises and meditation. However, these trials have typically involved multiple sessions per week, which may not be achievable for many people.
To find out if yoga helps to reduce blood pressure in the real world, at the University of Pennsylvania and Jason Moore at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles studied the electronic health records of 1355 people aged 18 to 79 in south-east Pennsylvania whose clinical notes said they practised yoga at least once a week.
They compared each of these people with at least three other individuals who had similar characteristics in terms of things like age, sex, race, postal code, body mass index, alcohol use, smoking status and use of blood pressure-lowering medications, but who had no mention of practising yoga in their clinical notes.
On average, the people who practised yoga had a systolic blood pressure that was 2.8 millimetres of mercury (mmHg) lower and a diastolic blood pressure that was 1.5 mmHg lower than those who didn鈥檛.
This blood pressure reduction probably wouldn鈥檛 make a huge difference to most people in the study, since they tended to be young, healthy women who already had normal blood pressures, says at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia. But at a population level, if average blood pressure declined by this much, it would prevent a significant number of heart attacks and strokes, he says.
For example, a 2015 study found that a population-wide average systolic blood pressure reduction of 2 mmHg among middle-aged adults in the US would prevent more than each year.
Based on the latest study, we can鈥檛 say for sure that yoga lowers blood pressure, because there may be other explanations for the findings, says at the聽Baker聽Heart and Diabetes聽Institute in Melbourne, Australia. For example, people who do yoga may have lower blood pressure because they tend to have better diets, not because of the yoga itself, he says.
Yoga shouldn鈥檛 be seen as a substitute for blood pressure-lowering medications, which typically reduce systolic blood pressure by more than 5 mmHg, says Head.
Nevertheless, yoga is likely to assist with lowering blood pressure if it encourages exercise-shy people to get moving, says Nelson. 鈥淭he greatest benefit is getting the sedentary to do something rather than increasing exercise in someone who does it regularly,鈥� he says. 鈥淥ne of the problems with exercise is for it to be sustained, and yoga as a static form of exercise may well be sustained because those who engage with it enjoy the social interaction and relaxation aspect of it.鈥�
BMC Public Health
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