Category Archives: Health

People With Rheumatoid Arthritis Feel Better After 6 Weeks of Iyengar-Style Yoga

Posted on May 26, 2012 | 1 Comment

From WebMD

By
WebMD Health News
young women in yoga class

May 24, 2012 (Honolulu, Hawaii) — Young patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) may feel better after practicing yoga for just six weeks, a new study shows.

Researchers reported their findings here last week at the American Pain Society’s annual meeting.

“It seems to be a very feasible, practical treatment for patients with rheumatoid arthritis,” one of the researchers, Kirsten Lung, tells WebMD. Lung researches pain at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The results are not surprising to Kathleen Sluka, PhD, a physical therapist who researches pain at the University of Iowa. All kinds of physical activity can help with rheumatoid arthritis, she tells WebMD. Sluka was not involved in this study.

RA is a chronic type of arthritis. It is an autoimmune disease. It is most common among women. Early symptoms include fatigue, joint pain, and stiffness.

As it progresses, RA may feel like the flu, with muscle aches and loss of appetite. Early and effective treatment may help prevent joint and bone destruction.

An Alternative to Drugs

The UCLA researchers say some drugs for RA can pose additional risks for younger patients. So the researchers are looking for alternatives. They decided to try Iyengar yoga.

In Iyengar yoga, practitioners may use blocks, straps, cushions, and other props to stretch and strengthen their muscles.

The UCLA researchers recruited 26 women with RA. The women’s ages ranged from 21 to 35. On average they had suffered from RA for 10 and a half years.

The researchers then assigned 11 of these women to classes in Iyengar yoga. They assigned the other 15 to a wait list for yoga classes.

After six weeks, they asked both groups about their condition. The group that practiced yoga said they were happier than when they started. They said they could better accept their pain. They also reported better general health and more energy.

The women on the wait list for yoga classes did not experience these improvements.

Even the women who did yoga did not report less pain or disability. That may be because the study was so short, says Lung. “But six weeks did a world of good for those involved.”

Sluka says that physical exercise usually takes about eight weeks to show significant effects. All kinds of exercise can help with RA, she says. “Yoga is just another form of exercise,” she says.

By strengthening muscles, exercise prevents joints from moving in uncomfortable ways. And it can activate parts of the nervous system that reduce pain.

The study is not conclusive, she points out, because it is very small. Also, there is a possibility that the people in the yoga group felt better just because they were doing something to help themselves, not specifically because they were doing yoga.

But the study is still worthwhile, Sluka says. It shows people with RA they have another option for getting exercise. “Some people like to run. Some people like to lift weights. Some people like to do yoga,” she says.

These findings were presented at a medical conference. They should be considered preliminary, as they have not yet undergone the “peer review” process, in which outside experts scrutinize the data prior to publication in a medical journal.

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Posted in Health

Upward-Facing Soldier

Posted on April 15, 2012 | 1 Comment
By LAUREN K. WALKER from The New York Times

YOU are sitting behind the Humvee where you’ve dragged a wounded soldier. You’ve wrapped the gaping hole in his leg, given him a shot of morphine and radioed up the line for help. Your eye is trained on a distant, hazy point through the scope of an assault rifle. You can see the tiny, magnified bodies of your enemy. Maybe they are waiting for another explosion. A bigger one. Your heart starts pounding harder. The temperature is over 100 degrees. The kid next to you, a kid you always found slightly annoying, with his Massachusetts accent and his unwillingness to walk in the front position of the line, is now holding a bloody pad to his thigh and biting down on a bandanna to keep from screaming. Sweat is pouring down his face. There is no easy way out. You simply have to wait and try not to give away your position. Through your scope you can see their rocket launchers in a pile on the ground.

What you do, without moving your hands from the rifle, is to start breathing, because you realize you have been holding your breath for a long time. So you deepen it. Slow, deeper, deeper. The hiccups of fear start to mellow out. You can feel your belly soften a bit. Then you visualize your breath. In the left nostril, out the right. In the right, out the left. After just a minute, the mad thumping in your chest begins to slow. You hold the fingertips of one hand to your forehead to calm the fight-or-flight response so you can think clearly. The situation has not changed, but you feel yourself change, and you are now able to deal with it.

Back in the safe and cold green mountains of central Vermont, I walk into the yoga room to face a roomful of boys and girls. They are 17, 18, 20 years old, but they seem more like boys and girls than men and women. The stress in my students’ lives is not at combat level. Yet. Right now, most of them have the stress of being in the Corps of Cadets at a military college. That means P.T. at 5:30 in the morning, and constant building, running, gunning, learning, hiking, jumping and being yelled at.

Norwich University, the birthplace of R.O.T.C. and the oldest private military college in the country, trains both military cadets and civilians in discipline, integrity, confidence, loyalty and honor.

From here, many of my military students will deploy to the deserts of Afghanistan. I have a boy leaving next week.

They are young. They are strong. They have incredible stamina. But they don’t have fluency or ease within their bodies. They do push-ups and pull-ups and bench presses and weighted lunges. They run 10 or 20 miles with heavy packs on. But they don’t know how to breathe or to access the core muscles in their abdomens that could help them hump their packs or carry a buddy to safety. I teach them this, and also, how to find that place deep inside that is whole, untouchable, sacred.

Halfway through the semester, I ask my students how they think yoga will help them. Why did they sign up for this class? “It helps us to focus on the good,” one says. “That’s the only way we can get through this place.”

I think of them as if they are in the Bhagavad Gita, the great Indian treatise on war. The soldier Arjuna stops on the battlefield and cries out to Lord Krishna: “Do I have to do this? Do I have to kill?” Krishna, instead of telling him what to do on the battlefield, teaches him yoga. So that is what I do. I teach them yoga.

I am humbled by this prospect, but I come in to the classroom strong. This is a community used to leadership. They stand at attention and call me ma’am. I have to show that I have enough strength to lead them. But I don’t teach them strength. They learn that enough. One girl said to me, “This is the only class where I don’t get yelled at.”

I want them to love and respect themselves. At the end of class, when they lie on their mats in savasana like children at nap time, I nurture and tuck in these bodies. I hold their ankles and swing their legs back and forth to let their hips soften. I roll their shoulder blades under their backs to help open their hearts. I hold their heads in my hands, while they lie there. They don’t get touched here, at military college. They don’t get nurtured. Everything is hard and harsh and angry and fast and sharp. Some of them are so stiff and rigid. They hold their heads at attention even when they’re lying down.

“Let go,” I say. “I’ve got you.” They relax their necks and let their heads sink into my waiting hands. Their hair is buzzed to the scalp or tied back in a tight bun. I hold their heads and pray over them. I pray with all my might that God does the right thing by this boy or this girl. I place their heads down on the blankets and hold my thumb over their third eye, hoping that they keep their intuition strong and will remember that their inner souls are stronger than any enemy outside of them, seen or not seen.

In the beginner’s class, it’s all I can do to keep my students breathing while they move. In the advanced class, I teach these future soldiers the profound philosophy of yoga: how to sit in a stress position and still breathe, smoothly and steadily. How to keep minds open and flexible, to develop non-attachment, compassion, contentment.

We talk about what it would be like to have a buddy blown open next to you. How you would immediately feel yourself flooded with the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline. How your natural impulse would be to run like hell to get out of there, or to train a machine gun at the horizon and blaze away at everything in your path. How much harder it is to remain calm, to analyze the situation and respond from a place of strength.

It may seem out of whack to hold chaturanga for 10 breaths and think this will be preparation for war. But in fact, this is what yoga is all about. And in fact, if there is anything at all that could truly prepare them to go and fight, it is yoga.

Many people ask me about ahimsa — the grand yogic tenet of nonviolence. I respond with what the revered yoga teacher T. K. V. Desikachar says: It simply means that we must always behave with consideration and attention to others.

So I teach them this, too.

Indeed, Arjuna killed members of his own family. He was following his dharma, and his conscience. He was fulfilling his destiny, playing out the role in the world that he, and only he, was created for.

In the world we have created, there is a huge divide between the ideal and the real. If everyone truly wanted no more war, we would have to change the behavior that leads us into war. But I am not here to teach the world to have no more war. That is for the Dalai Lama. I am here to teach these soldiers, these young men and women who are willing to pay for our system of democracy with their lives, how to uncover the truth of who they are. Who they are — warriors, lawyers, doctors, mothers, fathers, teachers, priests — is each one’s own specific path. I am here to help them find their inner souls, and to help them walk their paths with honesty, integrity and grace. It is what I teach in every yoga class.

But here at this military college, it feels weighted with much more consequence.

Lauren K. Walker runs the yoga program for veterans, cadets and civilians at Norwich University.

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Posted in Health, personal yoga practice, Research, Trauma

Use Yoga to Calm Spring Fever

Posted on April 11, 2012 | Leave a comment

From Feelgood Style

Do you get bouts of restless energy in the springtime? It turns out that spring fever is more than just a turn of phrase, and you can use yoga to harness all of that seasonal energy!

Scientists tell us that when the days lengthen and the temperature rises, changes in our bodies’ melatonin and serotonin cause what’s commonly called “spring fever.” Our energy spikes, winter’s dark mood brightens, and we may crave socializing, shopping, and sex. While frolicking in the sun (or a dark bedroom) is a well-deserved treat after months of hibernation, spring fever can sometimes plow over our core priorities. When the cherry trees blossom, we may find ourselves shirking work, fidelity, exercise, spiritual practices, and savings plans.

What is Spring Fever?

Yogis describe this seasonal lust for life not as a chemical change in the brain, but as a rise in the energy called apana. A counterpart to the often-discussed prana, apana resides in the pelvis and lower abdomen. In addition to regulating some physical outward functions such as urination, apana is responsible for our “urge to merge” with the material world and each other. According to Chris Mastin of PranaShine Yoga, when this energy shoots off the charts in spring, we can use postures and breathing to channel it in a positive way and ground ourselves.

Using Yoga to Calm Spring Fever

Here are Mastin’s recommendations for calming spring fever, on and off the mat:

1) If apana runneth over, you’ll need to burn off the excess before introverted breathing and stretching are doable. Crank some music and dance before you settle into lotus. Many yoga studios offer dance classes and parties, if you want to boogie en masse.

2) Make calming and integrating postures, such as forward folds and gentle twists, the bulk of your practice. Hold each for at least 30 seconds, maybe melting over a bolster or foam block for a fuller release.

3) Move your spine in all directions for balance, but minimize backbends, since these poses are invigorating.

4) To cultivate calm and self-awareness, do dirgha or ujjayi breathing with this twist: make your exhales longer than your inhales (say, count of 6 versus 4).

5) Do a session of nadi shodana breathing: press down your right nostril and breathe only through the left to activate the calming aspect of the nervous system. (Don’t switch sides, because breathing only through the right nostril is energizing.)

6) If you’re still buzzing with excess apana after a calming practice, direct the energy toward something you find uplifting, such as gardening or calling a friend, rather than an activity you’ll regret.

Stretch Like a Sprout

Even though sandal weather has you feeling vivacious, Mastin suggests, “behaving in the way that spring plants do, which is to bud before they blossom.” Unless you maintained a fitness model’s exercise routine all winter, ease into springtime yoga with slow movement and kriyas–moving rhythmically in and out of postures and stretches–before you attempt their full expression. That flow “oils” tense joints with fluids that help prepare them for the challenging activities we crave in warm months.

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Posted in Health, personal yoga practice

Yoga offers benefits for people with special needs

Posted on March 19, 2012 | 3 Comments

Calm, strength and stamina are among benefits seen

  • Yoga sessions with instructor Karen Fakroddin have improved mobility, strength and digestion for Erin Feeney, who has cerebral palsy.
Yoga sessions with instructor Karen Fakroddin have improved mobility,… (Chuck Berman, Chicago Tribune)
March 14, 2012|By Joan Cary, Special to the Tribune

Erin Feeney capped off her 19th birthday celebration with a huge accomplishment that still makes her smile.

For the first time in her life, she was able to blow out her birthday candle.

On Nov. 11 last year, when she turned 20, she did it again.

“Not two or three, but one, and one is way better than none,” said Erin’s mom, Louise Feeney of Naperville.

Erin has cerebral palsy, which alters all of her muscles, including her speech, but not her intelligence. Louise Feeney credits her daughter’s accomplishment with the birthday candle and other improvements in the quality of her life to yoga. A student at the College of DuPage, Erin spends an hour each week with Karen Fakroddin, a Yoga for the Special Child practitioner at Universal Spirit Yoga in Naperville.

Parents, educators and medical professionals are recognizing the benefits of yoga for young people with special needs, like Erin.

Three years of yoga have had a dramatic, positive impact on her daughter, Louise Feeney said. She believes that yoga has helped Erin with digestion, and given her more trunk control, less pain in her limbs, and more stamina, and helped with her breathing.

“The beauty of yoga is that it helps you wherever you are at,” said Fakroddin.

In Erin’s private yoga session, Louise Feeney helps move her daughter to the mat where Fakroddin cradles Erin in her arms, gently manipulating her constricted arms and legs to stretch out and to relax. She supports Erin, calmly encouraging her to use her neck muscles to lift her head for seconds. What to most are simple movements like putting her feet flat to the floor are slow and short-lived for Erin, but she is thrilled to accomplish them.

Yoga for the Special Child (www.specialyoga.com) is an international program designed by former Evanston resident Sonia Sumar in 1970 to help babies and children with cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, autism, attention deficit disorder and learning disabilities. There are now six certified practitioners in the Chicago area, and many in 26 other states and 12 other countries.

“The knowledge of yoga for special needs is up, and there is more coming,” said Fakroddin, who points out that practitioners never work without a doctor’s clearance and a thorough intake assessment. “It helps the special needs children to slow down, to focus. They are able to accept their limitations and work through them. It’s a tough world. To be able to empower them, to give them the tools to help themselves, is wonderful.”

Jessica Wheeler, 16, and Ellie Martin, 13, are enrolled in Fakroddin’s group class, and their mothers have witnessed improved strength, balance and posture in their daughters, as well as the joy of being in a social but noncompetitive class.

“It’s good for Ellie to be able to do something that everybody else can do,” said Suzanne Martin, of Naperville, whose daughter has a neuro-muscular disorder. “This is kind of an even playing field. Ellie can just join in. She loves swimming, but this is her favorite.”

Diane Wheeler, of Winfield, said Jessica, who has cognitive anxiety issues, uses her yoga breath at home and in class at Wheaton North High School to calm herself down.

“She’s more coordinated and can follow directions better,” Wheeler said.

He cautioned that instructors need to be informed and thoughtful about moves and positions, recognizing in particular that Down syndrome can present spinal cord issues.

“But yoga is going to benefit these kids more than it’s going to be a detriment,” he said.

The common thread among parents of special-needs children is that they want their child to learn how to relax and focus, said Erin Haddock, a Yoga for the Special Child practitioner at The Discovery Clinic in Glenview.

“You have to take it very, very slow. Any improvement is a success,” Haddock said. “We work with autistic children, and it’s a huge thing just for them to be OK with something new. One of the intangible benefits for them is self-confidence, being aware of themselves and knowing that they can control their own body.

“It’s great if you can start young, with early intervention,” Haddock said. “But with every case, we start very slowly. Toe and foot exercises. Eye movements. Working on the core strengths such as breathing and speaking. We have a girl in her teens who is just learning to walk. When she started, her feet were tight and curled up. It’s not what you would picture as your typical yoga session. At first it was a matter of rotating the toes gently, rotating the ankle, working on some standing poses.”

Nick Statkiewicz, 15, of Glenview, was one of Sumar’s first students and now works with Haddock. Nick came to his adoptive mother, Chris Statkiewicz, as a foster child of 3 with multiple diagnoses including autism and cognitive issues.

“Sometimes Nick’s body and his emotions go in all different directions,” Chris Statkiewicz said. “They said he’d never ride a bike, but he rides a bike. He shoots hoops. Yoga has helped him control his movements and limber up. There are times when he’s all over the place, and I will see him use his yoga to pull it all together. I am still surprised, but I see him do it all by himself.”

Statkiewicz believes every child should start the school day with yoga. “Think of how their days start. Get up. Get dressed. Eat. Get to school,” she said. “The children are hurried from one thing to another, emotions flying, and then a teacher says to sit down and start learning.”

In Kimberlee Goldsmith’s class at Bogan High School in Chicago, her 13 special-needs students, including 10 with autism, begin each school day with 25 minutes of yoga.

Goldsmith added it to her class time three years ago after observing how schools in India use yoga. She also incorporates academics such as counting by fives into their yoga time, maybe holding a pose for 25 seconds.

“They are much more focused during their yoga, so whatever lesson we incorporate, they learn and remember better throughout the day,” she said. “I have had many people inquire about what I do. There is not much written about it.”

At Brown Elementary in Chicago, 30 students, including 10 with special needs, stay for an elective Wednesday after school hip-hop yoga program offered through Carla Tantillo’s company, Mindful Practices, in Oak Park. A former teacher, Tantillo and her staff work with 20 schools, offering after school yoga programs. They also train teachers and staff to use yoga methods to calm their classes.

“The most powerful way to make a difference for special needs in a school setting is to train the auxiliary staff as well as the classroom teachers in calming methods, so everyone works as a team,” she said. “Every teacher is telling kids to calm down, be quiet, not be hyper, in a different way. Special-needs learners require continuity. They are often not given the tools besides medication to control their behavior. A calming program that is the same from class to class can give them those tools.”

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Posted in Children, Health, Research, yoga class

Yoga can help caregivers cope

Posted on March 18, 2012 | Leave a comment
From: UPI.com
Published: March. 18, 2012 at 2:08 AM
LOS ANGELES, March 18 (UPI) — For every victim of Alzheimer’s — about 5.4 million U.S. seniors — there is an exhausted, lonely caregiver, but researchers say yoga may help.

Dr. Helen Lavretsky, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and colleagues said the study involved 49 family caregivers who cared for a relative with dementia ages 45-91 — including 36 adult children and 13 spouses.

The participants were randomized into two groups. A meditation group was taught a brief, 12-minute yogic practice that included an ancient chanting meditation, Kirtan Kriya, which was performed every day at the same time for eight weeks. The other group was asked to relax in a quiet place with their eyes closed while listening to instrumental music on a relaxation CD, also for 12 minutes every day at the same time for eight weeks.

After eight weeks, the researchers found the meditation group showed significantly lower levels of depressive symptoms and greater improvement in mental health and cognitive functioning, compared with the relaxation group. The meditation group showed a 43 percent improvement in telomerase activity — slower aging and improved immune cell longevity — compared with 3.7 percent in the relaxation group.

“We know that chronic stress places caregivers at a higher risk for developing depression. On average, the incidence and prevalence of clinical depression in family dementia caregivers approaches 50 percent,” Lavretsky said in a statement. “Caregivers are also twice as likely to report high levels of emotional distress and have an increased rate of cardiovascular disease and mortality.”

The findings were published in online edition of the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.

Read more: http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2012/03/18/Yoga-can-help-caregivers-cope/UPI-70021332050912/#ixzz1pWkHRdEG

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Posted in Health

Harvard, Brigham Study: Yoga Eases Veterans PTSD Symptoms

Posted on March 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

From: CommonHealth

The words “Department of Defense” and “yoga” aren’t often uttered in the same breath, let alone in a long, conscious, exhale.

But preliminary results from a small study funded by the U.S. Defense Department, and led by a Harvard Medical School assistant professor, found that veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder showed improvement in their symptoms after ten weeks of yoga classes, including meditation and breathing, done twice a week, and fifteen minutes of daily practice at home.

William Haviland never considered himself a yoga kind of guy. He served in Vietnam in 1968 during the TET offensive. Ask him about his combat experience and out comes a torrent of trauma: “I remember the things that happened, I’ve seen people killed right before my eyes,” he says. Among his vivid recollections, more than 40 years after the fact: a sergeant lured into a booby-trapped village, then castrated by shrapnel; the screams of a woman being raped and tortured all night. “I have a stream of memories,” he says, many which come out during sleep. Haviland, 63, says he frequently attacked his wife in the middle of the night, after nightmares that he was being chased by a fast-approaching enemy. Yoga, he says “took me out of myself” and had a more profound calming effect than drugs or drinking.

“PTSD is a disorder involving dysregulation of the stress response system, and one of the most powerful effects of yoga is to work on cognitive and physiological stress,” says Sat Bir S. Khalsa, Ph.D., an assistant professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and the principal investigator of the yoga study. “What we believe is happening, is that through the control of attention on a target — the breath, the postures, the body — that kind of awareness generates changes in the brain, in the limbic system, and these changes in thinking focus more in the moment, less in the past, and it quiets down the anxiety-provoking chatter going on in the head. People become less reactive and the hormone-related stress cycle starts to calm down.”

One common symptom of PTSD is the dissociation of mind and body, feeling disconnected from oneself and one’s surroundings, as well as an experience of time displacement. The brain portrays the traumatic event as though it is live and active in the present even though it may have happened decades ago. The practice of yoga combines physical exercises, postures and breath regulation together with meditation and awareness in the present moment and Khalsa says this integrative characteristic of yoga is likely important in resolving this dissociative aspect of PTSD.

Joseph Muxie served in the military from 1977-1984. While stationed in England, he said, he experienced an unbearable assault that is at the core of his PTSD. After years of alcoholism and a stint in rehab, he saw an ad about the Brigham yoga study and decided to try it. “I think what the yoga has really allowed me to do is give me the ability to ground myself,” said Muxie, 51. “As a result, I’m more peaceful with myself in whatever moment I happen to be in.”

According to the VA, as many as 20% of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have PTSD; 10% of Gulf War vets and 30% of Vietnam vets are diagnosed with the disorder. In addition, approximately 23% of women reported they were sexually assaulted in the military and 55% of women and 38% of men experienced sexual harassment while serving. Military Sexual Assault (MSA) is a known factor in PTSD.

Because the incidence of trauma is so high, Khalsa says, the DOD’s, Telemedicine & Advanced Technology Research Center, which paid a total of $600,000 for this study, is exploring new approaches to treatment.

In the Brigham study, which has so far evaluated only the first 9 subjects to complete the protocol, each veteran’s PTSD severity was assessed using a tool called CAPS, the clinician-administered PTSD scale. The patient is scored by a trained psychologist using the CAPS scale both before and after the yoga intervention to determine any change in the scope and intensity of symptoms, which can include flashbacks, nightmares and a pervasive hyper-vigilance. According to Khalsa, the average baseline CAPS score before yoga in the subjects was 73.0, and the average score post-intervention was 43.6. (The average reduction in CAPS score pre-to-post was 29.4.) Here are the subject’s individual scores, before and after yoga:

– 113; 81
– 81; 40
– 111; 21
– 37;33
– 62;36
– 53;15
– 84;78
– 66;72
– 50;16

So, for 6 subjects, their scores improved quite a lot with yoga; for 3, there was little change. Khalsa said that typically even well-known, highly effective treatments don’t work for every patient and he is still evaluating other measures to determine if the yoga had any other non-CAPS benefits. “These subjects may possibly have benefited in things like depression or anxiety, even though their overall PTSD CAPS score did not change much (as was observed in a preliminary yoga-PTSD study in Australia)… Human subject research is pretty messy.”

Ultimately, he said he hopes to evaluate a total of 60 subjects, including a control group, but so far, recruitment has been slow, due to yoga’s “new age” reputation and its association with women. “There’s some sense that sissies do yoga,” he said.

Jennifer Johnston, a yoga teacher, licensed mental health counselor and the project leader, said that beyond recruitment, yoga’s “hot” reputation has in some sense eclipsed its greatest assets. “Because yoga is so sexy now, certain aspects get forgotten,” she said. “Yoga is a path to reconnect all of the parts of yourself. It’s a self-care strategy. The poses are important, but the philosophy is how we do our lives. The magic is in the meditation, integrating it and taking the yoga off the mat and into your life.”

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Posted in Health

Medicare covers yoga for heart disease

Posted on February 25, 2012 | 1 Comment

By William Hudson, CNN
updated 12:06 PM EST, Sat February 25, 2012

Medicare covers yoga for heart disease

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
  • Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease is covered by Medicare
  • Patients do yoga, eat a plant-based, meatless diet and meditate regularly
  • Kathy and Frank Korona have lost 85 pounds on the program

(CNN) — Frank Korona lives near the West Virginia-Pennsylvania border with his wife Kathy, in a house that he built with his own hands, on the same property where he grew up.

He served in the Army Special Forces in Vietnam. The Koronas have a long, proud tradition of military service, but their family’s greatest losses have been to heart disease.

“Our family has shrunk tremendously. We’ve lost so many people through death,” Kathy says.

In 1992, Frank’s brother Bob died in his arms, suffering a heart attack on their kitchen floor. Parents, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins have all died from complications from heart disease, too. The Koronas point them out in a graveyard near their home.

Frank and Kathy have both had heart attacks, and both have stents holding their blood vessels open. The birth of their grandson Caleb led them to try harder to extend their lives. So last year, the couple joined the Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease.

Medicare, the government health insurance program for Americans 65 and older, covers the Ornish program, which teaches a plant-based, meatless diet, meditation and regular exercise. The program was officially declared an intensive cardiac rehab program in 2010, and the first patients started in May 2011.

Ornish is a persistent advocate within the halls of government. There are mountains of scientific evidence that his recommended lifestyle changes do reverse heart disease, the No. 1 killer in the United States and worldwide.

Helping patients make these lifestyle changes costs Medicare about $70 per hour, and patients can receive up to 72 one-hour sessions. Proponents of preventative medicine point out that that cost is still much less than operations and medications.

Ornish believes that fear cannot motivate lifestyle change in people long-term. Change has to be about feeling better and having more zest for life. The greater the change, the better the feeling, he says.

Kathy and Frank Korona pose for a photo at a July 2008 wedding reception.
Kathy and Frank Korona pose for a photo at a July 2008 wedding reception.

That seems to ring true for the Koronas. Despite the grim history of heart disease, they say it’s how good they feel that keeps them living the lifestyle that their neighbors sometimes find strange.

“If I was going to be able to participate as a grandparent in his life, that gave me another incentive, that really did,” Kathy explains. “But in order to do that, I needed to feel good about myself first.”

The Koronas’ favorite yoga positions are “cobra” and “fish,” and their favorite pizza is meatless meat-lovers, made with soy pepperoni and soy “ground beef.”

“Usually at the end of the session, the instructor will say, ‘Now the reward, get into the total relaxation pose,’ and we do that, and it just feels so good,” Kathy says.

Together the Koronas have lost 85 pounds on the program, and Frank is off of four medications.

Hospitals can now bill Medicare for their patient’s yoga and group discussion sessions because the Ornish program is an approved intensive cardiac rehab program, a new class of cardiac rehab created by Congress in 2009.

Traditional cardiac rehab, developed in the 1950s and covered by Medicare since 1982, focuses almost exclusively on exercise — getting patients out of bed and the blood flowing again.

But in the 1970s, Ornish and others began leading experiments to test whether improving diet and stress levels could make a difference for those with heart disease. In the following decades the researchers published volumes of studies in peer-reviewed journals that became the basis of the Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease.

There are four components to the program: nutrition, stress management, moderate exercise and group support.

Part of the underlying cause for widespread heart disease, explains Ornish, is chronic loneliness and isolation, which lead to stress and bad habits. When people feel emotionally close to others, they’re physiologically healthier, too, so Medicare is paying for it.

In 1997, Highmark Health Insurance Co. became the first insurer to cover the Ornish program, but even today,only three insurance companies will pay for the program. All three are in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

That’s expected to change.

“The reason that I spent 16 years working with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to achieve Medicare coverage for our program is that I knew that most insurance companies follow Medicare’s lead. In other words, if Medicare covered our program, most other insurance companies would, as well,” explains Ornish, who also says he was once naive in thinking that solid science alone would be enough to change health care policy.

“Reimbursement as well as science are primary determinants of medical practice. If it’s not reimbursable, it’s not sustainable.”

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Posted in Health, Nutrition, personal yoga practice, Research

From Danger Zone to Om Zone: How Yoga is Making its Way Into Our Military

Posted on February 22, 2012 | Leave a comment

From the Huffintgon Post:

Yoga. Famously practiced by Madonna, Gwyneth, and Sting. Less-famously practiced by 16 million others. And now… even by our military. Though we envision the typical yoga-going American as a Lululemon-clad, earthy female, a fresh crop of American yogis are being cultivated from this fatigue-clad, stereotypically-rigid repository.

The Department of Defense is currently investigating yoga as a therapeutic intervention in its men and women, and much of its interest has been spurred by the large numbers of returning combat veterans with PTSD.

“Historically, PTSD has been overwhelmingly treated as a mental health condition with psychological treatments, and the body has been ignored. But PTSD is a mind-body disorder with both mental and physical components. So yoga, in its blending of physical postures with conscious breathing, adds a strong dimension for the existing treatment of PTSD,” says Sat Bir Khalsa, a researcher at Harvard Medical School who is conducting yoga trials on military personnel. “Our results are preliminary, but they do show a statistically significant improvement in the severity of PTSD with yoga,” he says.

The juxtaposition of a stern warrior practicing gentle movement is stark, but this isn’t the first time that a mind-body technique has been deployed to assist those on the battlefield. Tai chi, the ancient Chinese practice of subtle and deliberately-slow movement, was originally developed for Chinese soldiers. Only much later was this cloistered martial art made available to China’s civilians. But unlike tai chi, yoga’s origins are quite different. It was initially practiced by ascetics in ancient India as preparation for long periods of sitting meditation. In an ironic modern-day twist, the Indian army is now using yoga in its training in similar ways to ours.

In spite of yoga’s foray into their world, our military personnel still heed the call of Uncle Sam, not Uncle Swami. But yoga’s emphasis on being rather than doing does put a new spin on their jingle “Be all that you can be.”

Yet for all its Kumbaya, yoga’s entre into the military is not without controversy. As Khalsa reminds us, “As you make a more functional human being, you also have the potential to make a more functional warrior. So the question arises: Are you teaching yoga to help soldiers kill better? There certainly are people who have an ethical qualm about this.” That’s a big question, and sticking point, amongst those in the yoga community.

The therapeutic possibilities that yoga may provide are also being studied in another segment of the American population: its children. How might it be that a practice such as yoga, which seems to benefit military combat personnel, could also benefit the other extreme of the human experience — a characteristically innocent childhood?

Khalsa doesn’t think it’s a stretch. “Our entire culture is dedicated to teaching our young people important life skills that are needed to function well in our society. And yet no aspect of our culture provides training in life skills such as stress management, resilience or emotional regulation. That’s exactly what yoga can provide. If you teach yoga to children in schools, you eventually reach everyone — the military, doctors, nurses, diabetics — because everyone comes from childhood.”

Khalsa does have a point. Where else but in yoga can you embody the strength of a fighter (warrior pose) and the security of childhood (child’s pose) in one fell swoop?

In fact, in a study conducted by Khalsa of high school students, he found that those who practiced yoga over a semester fared better than those who didn’t. “The kids who weren’t taught yoga had a deterioration in resilience and emotional regulation, whereas the kids who were taught yoga stayed the same. They were able to hold their own.”

So, should yoga be taught in schools? Khalsa would unequivocally say yes. As for yoga’s place in the fabric of our culture, Khalsa is optimistic. “I hope it becomes an integral part of our culture, similar to how dental hygiene is an integral part of our culture. We’ve all been trained early in life to brush our teeth and floss. This message is reinforced by teachers in school. It’s also encouraged by dentists and physicians. I hope that mind-body hygiene ultimately achieves that same cultural relationship.”

Khalsa’s prediction is a tall order, and whether it will come to bear is anyone’s guess. But if yoga can help teach the life skills of resiliency and emotional regulation to our soldiers, as well as our children, who’s to say it won’t benefit the rest of us? After all, isn’t life sometimes a playground, and other times, a battlefield?

Follow Aditi Nerurkar, M.D., M.P.H. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@AditiNerurkar

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Mental Health: Study Links Immigrating at Young Age and Higher Risk of Psychosis

Posted on January 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

From The New York Times
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

A new study has found that among immigrants, younger age at the time of migration predicts a higher incidence of psychotic disorders.

The study, published last month in The American Journal of Psychiatry, was conducted from 1997 to 2005 in The Hague, Netherlands, where there are detailed records on almost everyone who has sought care for a possible psychotic disorder. The researchers found 273 immigrants, 119 second-generation citizens and 226 Dutch citizens who fit the criteria.

In four groups — people from Suriname, the Netherlands Antilles, Turkey and Morocco — the risk of psychosis was highest among those who immigrated before age 4. There was no association of psychosis with age among Western immigrants.

The researchers, led by Dr. Wim Veling of the Parnassia Psychiatric Institute, investigated various possible explanations — that social factors are involved, that people migrate because they are prone to psychosis, and that a decision to migrate is influenced by early appearance of psychosis, among others. But the correlation persisted.

“We don’t know the reason,” said Dr. Ezra Susser, the senior author and a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, “but it might be related to early social context, which we know has an important influence on later health and mental health.”

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Really? The Claim: Drinking Water Can Help Lower the Risk of Diabetes.

Posted on January 17, 2012 | Leave a comment

From the New York Times

THE FACTS

There are many reasons to stay properly hydrated, but only recently have scientists begun to consider diabetes prevention one of them. The amount of water you drink can play a role in how your body regulates blood sugar, researchers have found.

The reason: a hormone called vasopressin, which helps regulate water retention.

When the body is dehydrated, vasopressin levels rise, prompting the kidneys to hold onto water. At the same time, the hormone pushes the liver to produce blood sugar, which over time may strain the ability to produce or respond to insulin.

One of the largest studies to look at the consequences was published last year in Diabetes Care, a publication of the American Diabetes Association. French scientists tracked more than 3,000 healthy men and women ages 30 to 65 for nearly a decade. All had normal blood sugar levels at the start of the research.

After nine years, about 800 had developed Type 2 diabetes or high blood sugar. But those who consumed the most water, 17 to 34 ounces a day, had a risk roughly 30 percent lower than that of those who drank the least. The researchers controlled for the subjects’ intake of other liquids that could have affected the results, mainly sugary and alcoholic drinks, as well as exercise, weight and other factors affecting health. The researchers did not look at eating habits, something future studies may take into account.

THE BOTTOM LINE

There is some evidence that proper hydration can help protect against high blood sugar, though more research is needed.

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