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Dr. Dean Ornish is president and founder of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, as well as Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Dr. Ornish is widely known for his lifestyle-driven approach to the control of coronary artery disease (CAD). Dr. Ornish and colleagues showed that a lifestyle regimen featuring meditation, a low-fat vegetarian diet, smoking cessation, and regular exercise could not only stop the progression of CAD, but could actually reverse its course.

This result was demonstrated in a randomized controlled trial known as the Lifestyle Heart Trial, with data published in the Lancet in 1990, which recruited test subjects with pre-existing coronary artery disease. Not only did patients assigned to the above regimen fare better with respect to cardiac events than those who followed standard medical advice, their coronary atherosclerosis was somewhat reversed, as evidenced by decreased stenosis (narrowing) of the coronary arteries after one year of treatment. Most patients in the control group, by contrast, had narrower coronary arteries at the end of the trial than the start.

This discovery was notable not only because it had seemed physiologically implausible, but because it suggested a cheaper and safer weapon against cardiovascular disease than invasive procedures such as coronary artery bypass surgery.

External Links

http://www.webmd.com/content/pages/4/3080_453

References

• Ornish, D et al (1990). Can lifestyle changes reverse coronary heart disease? The Lifestyle Heart Trial. Lancet Jul 21;336(8708):129-33.

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