Recognizing and giving thanks for the positive aspects of life can
result in improved mental, and ultimately physical, health in patients
with asymptomatic heart failure, according to research published by the
American Psychological Association.
“We found that more gratitude in these patients was associated
with better mood, better sleep, less fatigue and lower levels of
inflammatory biomarkers related to cardiac health,” said lead author
Paul J. Mills, PhD, professor of family medicine and public health at
the University of California, San Diego. The study was published in the
journal Spirituality in Clinical Practice®.
Gratitude is part of a wider outlook on life that involves
noticing and appreciating the positive aspects of life. It can be
attributed to an external source (e.g., a pet), another person or a
non-human (e.g., God). It is also commonly an aspect of spirituality,
said Mills. Because previous research has shown that people who
considered themselves more spiritual had greater overall well-being,
including physical health, Mills and his colleagues examined the role of
both spirituality and gratitude on potential health markers in
patients.
The study involved 186 men and women who had been diagnosed with
asymptomatic (Stage B) heart failure for at least three months. Stage B
consists of patients who have developed structural heart disease (e.g.,
have had a heart attack that damaged the heart) but do not show
symptoms of heart failure (e.g., shortness of breath or fatigue). This
stage is an important therapeutic window for halting disease progression
and improving quality of life since Stage B patients are at high risk
of progressing to symptomatic (Stage C) heart failure, where risk of
death is five times higher, according to Mills.
Using standard psychological tests, the researchers obtained
scores for gratitude and spiritual well-being. They then compared those
scores with the patients’ scores for depressive symptom severity, sleep
quality, fatigue, self-efficacy (belief in one’s ability to deal with a
situation) and inflammatory markers. They found higher gratitude scores
were associated with better mood, higher quality sleep, more
self-efficacy and less inflammation. Inflammation can often worsen heart
failure.
What surprised the researchers about the findings, though, was
that gratitude fully or partially accounted for the beneficial effects
of spiritual well-being.
“We found that spiritual well-being was associated with better
mood and sleep, but it was the gratitude aspect of spirituality that
accounted for those effects, not spirituality per se,” said Mills.
To further test their findings, the researchers asked some of
the patients to write down three things for which they were thankful
most days of the week for eight weeks. Both groups continued to receive
regular clinical care during that time.
“We found that those patients who kept gratitude journals for
those eight weeks showed reductions in circulating levels of several
important inflammatory biomarkers, as well as an increase in heart rate
variability while they wrote. Improved heart rate variability is
considered a measure of reduced cardiac risk,” said Mills.
“It seems that a more grateful heart is indeed a more healthy
heart, and that gratitude journaling is an easy way to support cardiac
health.”
Article: “The Role of Gratitude in Spiritual
Well-Being in Asymptomatic Heart Failure Patients,” by Paul J. Mills,
PhD, and Deepak Chopra, MD, University of California, San Diego, and
Chopra Center for Wellbeing, Carlsbad, California; Laura Redwine, PhD,
Kathleen Wilson, MS, Meredith A. Pung, PhD, Kelly Chin, BS, Barry H.
Greenberg, MD, Ottar Lunde, MD, Alan Maisel, MD, and Ajit Raisinghani,
MD, University of California, San Diego; and Alex Wood, PhD, University
of Stirling. Spirituality in Clinical Practice, published online April 6, 2015.
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/04/grateful-heart.aspx
After years of fasting, the Buddha’s “legs were like bamboo sticks,
his backbone was like a rope, his chest was like an incomplete roof of a
house, his eyes sank right inside, like stones in a deep well,”
according to one account. The Buddha didn’t get what he wanted from this
extreme fasting—enlightenment—but a new study suggests that a diet that
replicates some effects of milder deprivation may not only lower your
weight but also confer other benefits. Researchers report that following
the diet for just 5 days a month improves several measures of health,
including reducing the risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
Eating shortens life, and not just because overindulgence can lead to
diseases such as diabetes. A diet that cuts food intake by up to 40%,
known as calorie restriction, increases longevity in a variety of
organisms and forestalls cancer, heart disease, and other late-life
illnesses. Although some short-term studies suggest that calorie
restriction provides metabolic benefits to people, nobody has confirmed
that it also increases human life span. The closest researchers have
come are two large, long-term studies of monkeys, and they conflict about whether meager rations increase longevity.
Even if calorie restriction could add years to our lives, almost no
one can muster the willpower to eat so little day after day, year after
year. An alternative that might be more, er, palatable is fasting, the
temporary abstinence from food. Gerontological researcher Valter Longo
of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and colleagues
have shown that fasting eases side effects of chemotherapy such as
fatigue and weakness, and animal studies suggest that it produces health
advantages similar to calorie restriction.
But hard-core fasting, in which people drink only water for days at a
time, may be no easier than calorie restriction. “I’ve done it, and it
was excruciating,” Longo says. For the new study he and his colleagues
devised a less grueling diet that might still trigger the benefits of
fasting. For two 4-day periods each month, middle-aged mice dined on
low-protein, low-calorie chow. The rest of the month, they could nosh as
much as they wanted.
The mice outlived their peers by an average of 3 months, a
substantial amount for the rodents, and they displayed numerous signs of
better health. As the researchers report online today in Cell Metabolism,
the mice shed fat and were 45% less likely to fall victim to cancer.
During their lean cuisine episodes, their level of blood sugar fell by
40% and the amount of insulin in the blood was 90% lower. And although
brainpower usually declines with age, the mice retained more of their
mental ability; they bested control animals in two kinds of memory
tests, perhaps because they produced more new neurons in the
hippocampus, a brain area crucial for memory.
Longo and colleagues also uncovered evidence that the regimen boosted the animals’ capacity to restore and replenish their tissues.
“That’s the most exciting” finding, Longo says. For instance,
regeneration of the liver was quicker in the fasting animals, and the
balance of different types of cells in their blood was more youthful.
The numbers of certain stem cells also soared in the dieting rodents.
To determine whether occasional austerity might have the same impact
on people, the researchers whipped up a menu of energy bars, soups,
teas, and chips. One day’s fare furnishes between 725 and 1090 calories.
“It’s not like eating ravioli, but it is better than going without,”
Longo says. (The average adult man in America needs about 2000 to 3000
calories daily; people following calorie restriction may limit
themselves to as few as 1200 calories.)
Much like the mice, the volunteers in the study followed the diet for
5 days straight and then returned to their usual dining habits for the
rest of the month. In their paper, the researchers report the results
for the first group of 19 subjects to try this “fasting mimicking”
regimen and for 19 controls.
Only three rounds of alternating between the diet and normal eating
appeared to improve the participants’ physical condition, reducing blood
glucose, trimming abdominal fat, and cutting levels of a protein
associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Longo and
colleagues also detected a slight rise in the abundance of some stem
cells in the blood, suggesting that the diet might promote regeneration
in humans. “We think that what the fasting mimicking diet does is
rejuvenate,” Longo says.
Other researchers say the results of the study are encouraging. “This
single dietary change can counteract all these variables of aging, and I
think that’s very impressive,” says molecular biologist Christopher
Hine of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. The study shows
that cutting calories all the time may not be necessary, adds biochemist
James Mitchell, also of the Harvard School of Public Health.
“Intermittent periods can have lasting effects.”
The new diet may also be more practical. “Calorie restriction has
failed miserably in human trials” because it’s so hard to stick to, says
gerontologist Rafael de Cabo of the U.S. National Institute on Aging in
Baltimore, Maryland, who leads one of the monkey studies of calorie
restriction. A regimen like the researchers use “is achievable,” he
says.
Longo and colleagues have already completed a larger clinical trial
of the diet with more than 80 subjects. Fasting like the Buddha is
dangerous, and even the fasting mimicking diet could be harmful for some
people, such as diabetics, Longo notes. Researchers need to study how
the regimen works, who might benefit, and who might be harmed by it,
Mitchell notes. “There is a lot of information to figure out.”
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/06/short-term-fasting-may-improve-health
