Podcast Summary

Welcome to Dr. Warrick's podcast channel. Warrick is a practicing cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education. Warrick believes educated patients get the best health care. Discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr. Warrick Bishop and I'd like to welcome you to my podcast station and my videocast station and of course to the Healthy Heart Network. Today I'm going to talk about cardiac failure and one aspect that I get a few questions about and that is, is yoga helpful for cardiac failure? Because patients invariably want to know what can they do to help their situation. Of course there's medications and we talk about that. But are there lifestyle things that can be employed to make a difference? Well we know exercise is valuable so there's no question exercise and cardiac failure has been shown to be beneficial. But what about yoga? We know that there are aspects to yoga that might end up being beneficial for cardiac failure. There is certainly some evidence that suggests the practice of yoga can turn down the autonomic nervous system, which is the driver, one of the problematic drivers in cardiac failure. We also know that yoga improves strength in the legs, improves flexibility, and improves quality of life. the sympathetic nervous system, slowing all those fight and flight responses down, that's got to be a good thing. And if we can make people move better and feel better, that sounds like it's got to be a good thing as well. So we know that there's benefit in exercise. There's no question about that. And we know that even the practice of yoga does correlate with the benefit of exercise equivalence. We also know that yoga offers a mental benefit by decreasing the stress that people feel, decreasing that sympathetic nervous system drive. We know that because we've seen studies where yoga practice can decrease the recurrence of atrial fibrillation. Unbelievably, it can even reduce the frequency of discharge of shock from implantable defibrillators. So yoga, good for your head. good for your heart. We did find a paper that's referenced about 17 specific studies where they've looked at yoga and heart failure and then many other studies looking at yoga and cardiovascular disease including blood pressure. There's plenty of data to support that yoga can lower blood pressure and the reason that we think it can lower blood pressure is because of the interplay between yoga and the parasympathetic slash sympathetic nervous system. We think through muscular stretch we can alter tone within the body and also release stress within the body and alter that sympathetic drive, increasing parasympathetic drive. There's also nice data to show that the heart failure trials with yoga demonstrate improved. quality of life, improved flexibility, but they've also taken blood tests and demonstrated a decrease in inflammatory markers. How interesting is that? Further, other studies of other groups have demonstrated that yoga will decrease weight, which can be a good thing, and decrease depression rates. It's got to be a good thing as well. One other group went even further and took patients with decreased ejection fraction, put them through yoga or not for six months and then re-evaluated their hearts, demonstrating a clear-cut benefit in the group that undertook yoga with improved function of their heart. So, certainly sounds a very positive thing to do if that's the way you enjoy your exercise. altering the vagal tone, so the slowing down mechanism of the autonomic nervous system. It reduces stress. It improves stretch and strength in the legs. We see this down-regulating the parasympathetic nervous system and improving some of these inflammatory factors within the blood. Certainly, these studies demonstrate improved heart rate variability, improved blood pressure, a lowering of heart rate, decreased inflammatory markers, better sleep and an improved quality of life. So if you've got impaired left ventricular function, and even if you don't, exercise is a great thing. But if you choose your exercise with yoga and bring that mental process, stretch and relaxation, then there's a very good chance you'll be getting an added benefit. So I'll let you meditate on that. I hope I've given you some interesting stuff to think about. As always, if you have any questions, drop us a note. If you have any suggestions for future podcasts, again, please let us know. As always, I'd like to wish you the very best and until next time, please don't die from a heart attack. Goodbye. You have been listening to another podcast from Dr. Warrick. Visit his website at drWarrickbishop.com for the latest news on heart disease. If you love this podcast, feel free to leave us a review.