Meditation may benefit heart patients

Meditation helps a lot of things because it reduces stress, but now there specific data about how it helps heart patients. A small pilot study was done on 23 African American patients hospitalized with congestive heart failure. Half of the patients were instructed on Transcendental Meditation and told to continue it for 6 months, while the other half was simply educated on their diagnosis and sent home without being asked to meditate regularly. After 6 months the people that meditated not only showed lower levels of depression but also performed better than their non-meditating counterparts on the six-minute walking test that measures functional capacity.

Obviously, this was a small non-diverse study that will need to be repeated on a larger scale and get the same results before the data is considered reliable.