Qigong, an Effective Therapy for High Blood Pressure
 
January 16, 2015 - Several researchers from Harvard Medical School, China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences and McMaster University of Canada teamed up to perform a comprehensive review to evaluate the efficacy and safety of Qigong for high blood pressure.

A systematic literature search was performed in 7 databases from their respective inceptions until April 2014, including the Cochrane Library, EMBASE, PubMed, Chinese Scientific Journal Database, Chinese Biomedical Literature Database, Wanfang database, and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure. Randomized controlled trials of Qigong as either monotherapy or adjunctive therapy with antihypertensive drugs versus no intervention, exercise, or antihypertensive drugs for high blood pressure were identified.

Twenty trials containing 2349 hypertensive patients were included in the meta-analysis. The risk of bias was generally high. Compared with no intervention, Qigong significantly reduced systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Qigong was inferior to exercise in decreasing SBP, but no significant difference between the effects of Qigong and exercise on DBP was identified.

Compared with antihypertensive drugs, Qigong produced a clinically meaningful but not statistically significant reduction in SBP, but appeared to be more effective in lowering DBP. Qigong plus antihypertensive drugs significantly lowered both SBP and DBP compared with antihypertensive drugs alone. No serious adverse events were reported.

The meta-analysis suggests that Qigong is an effective therapy for high blood pressure. However, more rigorously designed randomized controlled trials with long-term follow-up focusing on hard clinical outcomes are required to confirm the results.

Their findings are published by the journal Medicine (Baltimore) in its first issue of 2015.