Tai Chi May Help Heart Failure Patients

These are extracted from the whole article published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Article by Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

MONDAY, April 25 (HealthDay News) -- The ancient Chinese exercise of Tai chi may improve quality of life for people suffering from heart failure, Harvard researchers report.Tai chi combines flowing circular movements, balance and weight-shifting, breathing techniques and focused internal awareness. It has already been shown to be helpful with a number of medical conditions, including hypertension (high blood pressure), balance and musculoskeletal diseases, and fibromyalgia, the researchers noted."Tai chi training improved important parameters of quality of life, mood and confidence to perform exercise in patients with heart failure," said lead researcher Dr. Gloria Yeh, from the division of general medicine and primary care at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

For the study, Yeh's team randomly assigned 100 heart failure patients to a 12-week Tai chi program or to educational sessions about heart failure.The researchers found that although both groups had similar oxygen use during six-minute walks, those who practiced Tai chi showed greater improvements in quality of life, which was measured using the Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire.In addition, those taking part in Tai chi also showed improvement in mood and improvement in the number of calories burned each week, compared with those in the education program, the researchers added.People with chronic heart failure suffer from the inability of the heart to pump blood efficiently to meet the body's needs. The condition causes shortness of breath, coughing, chronic venous congestion, ankle swelling and difficulty exercising.

"As a complement to standard medical care, this study has demonstrated that Tai chi enhanced quality of life, mood and exercise self-efficacy," Fonarow said. "Tai chi appears to be a safe alternative to low- to moderate-intensity conventional exercise training in patients with heart failure. Further studies are needed to compare Tai chi to aerobic exercise training, and to determine if participation in Tai chi will have a favorable impact on risk of hospitalization or survival in patients with heart failure."

Green tea and tai chi

Doc Rowe sent this along about green tea and tai chi being good for post-menopausal women. He thought the study structure could be better but the idea is interesting.
http://asn-cdn-remembers.s3.amazonaws.com/08879102ee441a9a3970d15d059627c9.pdf

Web resource for internal practitioners

This is an e-magazine, "Nurturing Life".  http://www.yang-sheng.com/

The Crocodile and the Crane

I was given this book as a gift by Marc Sigle on my last trip to Germany. It's a story wrapped around an American chi-kung master but not a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon type of story. I did not know how to describe it but when I looked at the back cover, there it was in small print; Fiction/Martial Arts Fiction/Apocalyptic Thriller. I didn't know they had an Apocalyptic Thriller catagory.
   I read it quickly. It had just enough detail on chi-kung and martial arts to keep me interested as well as a story that kept moving. The author is a well-versed martial artist. His bio says he did some kenpo.
   If you're into Chinese martial arts I think you'll like it. $12.95, ISBN-13 is 978-1-59439-087-6.

http://www.amazon.com/Crocodile-Crane-Novel-Immortality-Apocalypse/dp/1594390878

Tai chi beats back depression in the elderly

This was on the univ. of California website. It is not a complete copy of the article. but what I have here is interesting.
Researchers at UCLA turned to a gentle, Westernized version of tai chi chih, a 2,000-year-old Chinese martial art. When they combined a weekly tai chi exercise class with a standard depression treatment for a group of depressed elderly adults, they found greater improvement in the level of depression — along with improved quality of life, better memory and cognition, and more overall energy — than among a different group in which the standard treatment was paired with a weekly health education class.
The results of the study appear in the current online edition of the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.
"This is the first study to demonstrate the benefits of tai chi in the management of late-life depression, and we were encouraged by the results," said first author Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a UCLA professor-in-residence of psychiatry. "We know that nearly two-thirds of elderly patients who seek treatment for their depression fail to achieve relief with a prescribed medication."
In the study, 112 adults age 60 or older with major depression were treated with the drug escitalopram, a standard antidepressant, for approximately four weeks. From among those participants, 73 who showed only partial improvement continued to receive the medication daily but were also randomly assigned to 10 weeks of either a tai chi class for two hours per week or a health education class for two hours per week.
All the participants were evaluated for their levels of depression, anxiety, resilience, health-related quality of life, cognition and immune system inflammation at the beginning of the study and again four months later.

An interesting Yoga blog

This person is knowledgeable on body mechanics. Worth a look.
http://www.dailybandha.com/

Meditation versus dance for harmonizing mind and body

This is a rather interesting article. It says that meditators are better tuned to their bodies than dancers. Read the article to see how they established this.
http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/02/23/meditation-dance/