Ornish Program Shows Benefit in Diabetes : The individual components all seem involved in improving coronary heart disease in diabetic patients.

“Traditional cardiac rehabilitation programs may increase their effectiveness by including a stress management component,” Dr. Daubenmier and her associates concluded.

Impact of Support Groups

The third analysis, from Ute Schulz, Ph.D., focused on the impact of the group support component among the 440 participants in the earlier eight-site demonstration project. At 1 year, significant changes in coronary risk factors included reductions in weight from 85 to 80 kg and in LDL/HDL ratio from 4 to 3, along with increases in physical and mental functioning.

On average, participants attended 77% of all offered support group sessions during the year. The more support group sessions participants attended, the more time they spent practicing stress management and exercising.

That, in turn, was associated with better physical and mental functioning, weight loss, and decreased LDL/HDL ratios.

“Support group attendance may indirectly influence changes in coronary risk factors by fostering participants' adherence to exercise and stress management.… These findings underline the importance of multicomponent programs in secondary prevention of CAD,” Dr. Schulz and her associates said.

Few in the medical community doubt the efficacy of the Ornish program—what they question is whether it can be implemented in the real world. Those who work at the PMRI—of which Dr. Ornish is founder, president, and director—hope that the final results from the MCLIP will encourage physicians to try harder to get patients into the program.

At a symposium held during the American Psychosomatic Society meeting, Gerdi Weidner, Ph.D., PMRI vice president and director of research, summarized the previously reported data on the Ornish program and offered this perspective when questioned about its real-world applicability: “Of course lifestyle changes are not for everyone, but open heart surgery's not for everyone, either. Once you've been stented three times, the fourth time is not for [anybody].”