Washington:
The American Academy of Yoga and Meditation is launching a symposium on how yoga can prevent cardiovascular çomplication, the world’s most common killer disease. The ‘Ganges Mississippi Dialogue’ is being organized by a group of cardiologists led by Tennessee-based Dr. Indranill Basu Ray at the weekend.
“The sudden global explosion of CVD (cardiovascular disease) is due to poor lifestyle choices, lack of exercise, wrong diet and grossly increased stress in today’s living,” said Dr. H R Nagendra, Vice-Chancellor of the SVYASA, the world’s oldest and largest Yoga University and a pioneer in the use of Yoga for medical problems. The virtual event will highlight how yoga can prevent heart attack, stroke, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, heart failure, and atrial fibrillation.
“Stress is the principle killer and Yoga by balancing the autonomic nervous system negates stress and its bad effects,” he said in a statement issued by The American Academy of Yoga and Meditation. The symposium is being organized on the occasion of World Heart Day. Dr Indranill Basu Ray, a cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist at the Memphis VA Medical Center and a Professor of Public Health at the School of Public Health at The University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee, said that many research papers and metanalysis have shown the positive effect of Yoga in decreasing cardiovascular risk.
“Thus, regular yoga practice may help mitigating Heart attack, stroke, heart failure, and dangerous arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation may be mitigated,” Dr. Ray said. He further clarified that “advanced molecular biology and imaging techniques have clearly shown that yoga can decrease expression of genes that are active during stress leading to inflammation of all blood vessels leading to heart attack, stroke, heart failure, etc.” Dr Dilip Sarkar, a former President of the influential international yoga organization IAYT, said that stress is the root cause of diseases like hypertension and diabetes, while drugs may help in amelioration but cure or prevention can only be affected by a radical change in lifestyle that includes yoga and meditation.
Dr. Nirmal Gupta, Chief of Cardiovascular Surgery at a premier medical institution near New Delhi, said that “the only way to stem this epidemic of death and suffering is adopting regular yoga and meditation along with low-fat diet and a stress-free lifestyle that is also known as a yogic lifestyle.”
