Do you go to the gym to strengthen your body? Well, you may be missing out on training some vital muscles-the ones involved in breathing. New research shows that training these muscles each day can reduce high blood pressure and promote heart health.
"The muscles we use to breathe atrophy, just like the rest of our muscles, as we get older," explains Daniel Craighead, a physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. To test what happens when these muscles are given a good workout, he and his colleagues enlisted healthy volunteers aged 18 to 82 to try a daily five-minute technique using a resistance-breathing training device called PowerBreathe. The device forces the patient to use their breathing muscles to push and pull air through it, making them stronger.
"We found that doing 30 breaths per day for six weeks lowers blood pressure by about 9mmHg (毫米汞柱)," Craighead says. And those reductions are about what could be expected with traditional exercise, he says-such as walking, running or cycling. The impact of a sustained 9mm Hg reduction is significant, says Michael Joyner, a physician at the Mayo Clinic who studies how the nervous system regulates blood pressure." That's the type of redaction you see with a blood pressure drug" Joyner says. Research has shown many common blood pressure medicines lead to about a 9 mmHg reduction. The reductions are higher when people combine multiple (多种的) medicines, but a 10 mmHg reduction relates to a 35% drop in the risk of stroke and a 25% drop in the risk of heart disease.
"I think it's promising." Joyner says about the prospects of integrating strength training for the muscles used to breathe into preventive care. It could be beneficial for people who are unable to do traditional exercise, he says, and the simplicity is appealing, too, given people can easily use the device at home. However, the technique is not intended to replace exercise, he cautions, or to replace medication for people whose blood pressure is so high that they're at high risk of having a heart attack or stroke. Instead, Craighead says, "it would be a good additive intervention (干预) for people who are doing other healthy lifestyle approaches already."
