Link Between Pregnancy Complications and Heart Disease

by NinaThe Kiss by Mary CassattBaxter and I recently read an extraordinary 50-year study Pregnancy Complications and Cardiovascular Disease Death: Fifty-Year Follow-Up of the Child Health and Development Studies Pregnancy Cohort  that was conducted on nearly 15,000 women who became pregnant from 1958 to 1967. The study noted which of the pregnant women had pregnancy complications and then followed all the women through 2011. For those women...

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Yoga After Heart Surgery for Stent Placement

by Baxter Back in the late 60s and early 70s, a new surgical treatment for blocked heart blood vessels was being perfected. Known as coronary artery bypass grafting, it allowed doctors to work around the heart’s own blood vessels that supply the muscle of the heart with oxygen and nutrition when they became dangerously plugged with plaque buildup. Patients that previously would have, most likely, suffered severe or life-ending heart attacks...

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Heart Health and Yoga: An Overview

by NinaThe Heart by Henri Matisse*After three years of blogging, even I, the Editor-in-Chief, can't remember everything that’s on our blog. So because someone close to me has developed heart disease and I want to be able to help him, I’ve been—hahaha—reading through my own blog today. At the same time that I’m trying to see which topics we’ve covered so far (nothing on stents that I can see—paging Dr. Baxter Bell!), I’m also trying to get up...

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Yoga for Heart Conditions

by ShariOne of the workshops I teach regularly with my colleague Bonnie Maeda is Yoga for Heart Conditions. Bonnie and I believe that yoga can be so effective for the management of heart disease because it is a holistic health approach that takes into account all of the varied systems of the body —in yoga, the body is part of a greater whole. Yoga is also accessible to all who want to practice, no matter what their physical ability may be. And...

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Chronic Stress: An Introduction

by NinaWounded Bird by Brad GibsonAn ongoing theme that we’ll be exploring in depth on this blog is the negative effects of chronic stress on long-term health and the need for stress management as an important aspect of healthy aging. So perhaps it’s a good time for me to define exactly what we mean by “chronic stress” and to let you know a little about why it is such a serious problem.I learned about dangers of chronic stress the hard way. Back...

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