India Faces Cardiovascular Epidemic; Yoga Can Stem It, Say Experts

This programme, held on World Heart Day on September 29, will be broadcast in the US and internationally to raise awareness on October 3, it said.

“The sudden global explosion of CVD is due to poor lifestyle choices, lack of exercise, wrong diet and grossly increased stress in today’s living,” says Dr H R Nagendra, founder vice chancellor of Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (S-VYASA), the world’s oldest and largest Yoga university and medical centre, and a pioneer in the use of yoga for medical problems.

“Stress is the principal killer and Yoga by balancing the autonomic nervous system negates stress and its bad effects,” said the yoga advisor to many well-known personalities, including Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi.

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, said that many research papers and meta-analyses have shown the positive effect of yoga in decreasing cardiovascular risk.

“Thus, regular yoga practice may help mitigate heart attack, stroke, heart failure, and dangerous arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation may be mitigated,” he said. “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,” Basu was quoted as saying.

Dr Dilip Sarkar, a former president of the influential international yoga organisation IAYT, said, “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.”