According to a study presented Monday at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting, “heart disease patients who practice TM [Transcendental Meditation] have almost 50% lower rates of heart attacks, stroke and deaths compared to similar patients who don’t practice meditation.” That’s from Shari Roan on the Los Angeles Times blog, Booster Shots.
I bet you can guess where I’m going with this. That 50 percent drop represents what–100 heart attacks in the control group and 50 in the meditators? Or two in the control group, and one in the meditators? Roan doesn’t say.
I wasn’t at the heart association meeting this year, so I went to the press release from the Medical College of Wisconsin. There I found the following bullet point: “A 47 percent reduction in the combination of death, heart attacks, and strokes in the participants.” But no actual numbers. (While I’m at it, why say “almost 50%,” as Roan did, when 47% is more accurate–and shorter?)
Roan also backs into her story, beginning by telling us that TM is one of the most studied meditation techniques, and the new work adds to the evidence that it’s helpful. But she never tells us what those earlier studies said. She does include a few words on a separate study that found TM-associated reductions in blood pressure in college students.
There is no evidence that she interviewed anyone from either study. She evidently rewrote the releases. That might be excusable for a blogger who lives on 50-cent refills and free wireless at Starbuck’s, but it’s hard to justify from the LA Times.
Jue Wang of the AAAS news service ScienceNow provided more detail on the study, but still did not say how many heart attacks and strokes occurred in the experimental group and control group. Wang did helpfully include comment from others who were apparently not involved in the research.
Most other news outlets ignored it. The story has only scattered presence on Google health news. I’m not terribly surprised by that. I suspect fewer news organizations are sending reporters to the heart association in these difficult financial times. And perhaps many science and medical reporters were too cynical and skeptical to spend time on this, especially while they are swamped with mammography this week.
But this study was done with a $3.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. That’s a lot of money, and we should be paying attention to how it’s spent. Besides, this seems to be a legit study, and it offers hope of a relatively easy and inexpensive way to prevent a lot of heart disease. At this moment, the Congressional Budget Office is calculating the costs of health reform. Shouldn’t we be reporting on research that could potentially affect those costs?
– Paul Raeburn
Grist: Medical College of Wisconsin press release; Maharishi University of Management release.
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