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 Researchers analyzed data on more than 4,400 patients who were
referred by their health care providers to the Benson-Henry
Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital
in Boston, where they received what’s known as relaxation response
training.
Compared to the year before the training, in the year afterward,
these people had an average 43 percent reduction in their use of
health services. Over the same period, health services use was
little changed for another group of 13,000 similar patients who
didn’t receive relaxation response training.
Plenty of evidence over the last few decades has linked practices
like meditation and yoga to beneficial physiological changes in the
body ranging from better cardiac function to reduced inflammation,
noted lead study author Dr. James Stahl, director of the Institute
for Technology Assessment at Massachusetts General.
What the current study offers is a link between these forms of
stress reduction and fewer visits to the doctor, Stahl added by
email.
“Meditation and yoga reduce stress, which in turn promotes wellness,
which in turn reduces seeking and using healthcare resources,” said
Stahl, who practices at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in
Lebanon, New Hampshire.
The relaxation response elicited by practices such as meditation,
prayer and yoga is meant to help people counteract the toxic impact
of chronic stress by slowing down their breathing and relaxing their
muscles.
In yoga, for example, a sun salutation is a series of poses done in
a fluid sequence and designed to focus on breathing and improving
muscle strength and flexibility.
Such relaxation techniques can be an antidote to the
flight-or-flight response, a survival mechanism that kicks in when
people feel threatened and experience a surge in stress hormones
that cause muscles to tense and the heart to race, Stahl and his
colleagues write in PLOS ONE.
For the current study, the researchers reviewed medical billing
records for patients treated throughout Partners HealthCare, a
system that includes Massachusetts General and several other
Boston-area healthcare facilities.
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All the patients in the treatment group had gone through a
Relaxation Response Resiliency Program (3RP) at Mass General's
Benson-Henry Institute. One year after their training, these
patients' clinical visits had decreased by 42 percent, lab use
declined by 44 percent and procedures dropped by 21 percent,
compared to the year before training.
Emergency department visits dropped to about 1.7 a year from 3.7 in
the year before the intervention.
One limitation of the study is that it focused only on utilization,
not on the cost of care or outcomes of the relaxation response
training such as the potential to reduce mortality, the authors
acknowledge. This makes it impossible to assess whether the
intervention is cost-effective.
Also, because the mind-body training provided in the study
integrated numerous techniques, it’s not possible to tease out the
impact individual activities such as meditation or cognitive skills
training might have in isolation, said Bei-Hung Chang, a researcher
at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester who
wasn’t involved in the study.
Even so, the findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting
that these practices can reduce health costs, Chang said by email.
“One of the obstacles in integrating mind and body techniques into
the health care system is the lack of empirical evidence from
rigorous studies,” Chang said. “The findings from this study . . .
could serve to overcome this obstacle and hopefully convince those
patients and clinicians who are looking for empirical evidence to
endorse these techniques.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1GdBa80 PLOS ONE, online October 13, 2015.
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