Chapter 18
HEART DISORDERS

More than 1.5 million people in the U.S. suffer from heart attacks every year, and 500,000 die as a result, nearly half of them women. In fact, more Americans die each year from cardiovascular disease–44%–than from all other causes of death combined, including cancer, AIDS, infectious diseases, accidents, and homicides. Cardiovascular disease is a general name for more than 20 different diseases of the heart and its blood vessels. Coronary artery disease (CAD), also referred to as coronary heart disease (CHD), is the most deadly of all heart disorders, accounting for approximately one out of every three heart disease deaths.

On a personal level, when people learn they have a heart disorder, some consult a conventional heart specialist who will provide the heart treatments recommended by the American Medical Association, including drugs and surgery. Others choose a holistic heart specialist who will suggest non-invasive, low-risk therapies based on lifestyle changes in such critical areas as nutrition, stress reduction, and exercise.

In 1989, 48 patients with severe coronary heart disease enrolled in a very unusual one-year experimental study conducted by heart specialist Dr. Dean Ornish. In Ornish's study, reported in Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease , participants were divided randomly into two groups. Patients in the usual care group were asked to follow their doctors' advice: to make moderate dietary changes (eat less red meat and more fish and chicken, use margarine instead of butter, and consume no more than three eggs per week), to exercise moderately, and to quit smoking. Patients in the other group were asked to follow Ornish's holistic heart reversal program, which included cessation of smoking, a vegetarian diet which allowed no more than 10% of calories to come from fat, stress management (including meditation, relaxation exercises performed one hour a day, and group support), and moderate exercise (30 minutes daily).

Both groups were given angiograms at the beginning of the study and one year later for comparison purposes. After only one year, 82% of the people who adopted Ornish's comprehensive lifestyle changes demonstrated “some measurable average reversal of their coronary artery blockages.” Overall, the average blockage reversed from 61.1 to 55.8%; more severely blocked arteries showed even greater improvement. Four arteries that had been completely blocked began to open, even those that had been totally occluded for years. The group also experienced a 91% decrease in the frequency and severity of chest pain. According to Ornish, most coronary blockages take decades to build up, but even a small amount of reversal after one year in a severely blocked artery causes a great improvement in blood flow to the heart (as measured by a cardiac PET scan). As a result, these participants began to feel better very quickly. In contrast, the majority of heart patients in the comparison (usual care) group who were following their doctors' advice became measurably worse during the same one-year interval.

Ornish's breakthrough study provided the first solid evidence that major lifestyle changes can do what scientists thought impossible–reverse heart disease (unclog arteries) without the use of drugs or surgery. And the findings were so conclusive that one major insurance company, Mutual of Omaha, announced it would cover this diet and stress-reduction program, making it the first nonsurgical, nonpharmaceutical therapy for heart disease to qualify for insurance reimbursement. This chapter analyzes the holistic therapies developed by Ornish and others to prevent, treat, and even reverse major coronary heart disorders.