An individualized yoga program can produce large reductions in blood pressure when added to optimal medical therapy.  Results were reported even among patients who might never set foot in a yoga studio, in an ambitious randomized trial testing of two somewhat unconventional add-on components as part of an integrated cardiac-rehabilitation program in Germany.

The secret to yoga’s success in the male, “blue-collar” group studied, however, may lie in the fact that the word “yoga” was never used.

Mayer-Berger presented the results of the trial last week at the EuroPREVENT 2010 meeting, and discussed the fact that yoga-type interventions would typically be chosen by “intellectual female patients”.  He admitted, that most of the “low-education males” studied in this trial, didn’t realize they were doing yoga, because the word yoga “was not spoken”.

The comparator therapy, progressive muscle relaxation (PMR), which is a more common component of cardiac-rehab programs in Germany, did not produce nearly the same degree of blood-pressure improvement, while the two randomizations were called “relaxation #1″ and “relaxation #2″.

Mayer-Berger says he and his colleagues are working on a follow-up study that will test a yoga program specifically in people with higher baseline blood pressures and that will try to figure out the best way to keep patients motivated—never an easy task. He does think that not using the term “yoga” likely helped keep many unlikely yogis on this particular program, and he says the next study will likely use the same nebulous terms used in the pilot study.

He added that he thinks it is “too early to make yoga a part of usual cardiac-rehabilitation therapy,” but should ongoing studies confirm the effect he and his colleagues saw here, “maybe this is really an everyday therapy we can use.”

More on using nebulous terms to get people to take better care of themselves at heartwire.

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