Heart Coherence: A New Tool in the Management of Stress on Professionals and Family Caregivers of Patients with Dementia

Abstract

We describe a stress management intervention intended to reduce the damage and stress impact on the heart physiology and function of a group of caregivers (professional and non-professional) who work with patients with dementia. The intervention consisted in applying heart coherence techniques in a population of 72 caregivers of patients with dementia (42 professional and 29 non-professional caregivers) who had high scores in heart stress and burden tests. Six months after the training they were able to generate appropriate patterns of heart coherence, with a statistically significant decrease in their heart overload. We conclude that training in techniques of heart coherence and positive psychology had effective results on the stress management of the participant caregivers. This was a simple, inexpensive technique with lasting results. To our knowledge this is the first research in Spain studying the application of heart coherence techniques to caregivers of people with dementia.

A randomized control trial of stress management for caregivers of stem cell transplant patients: Effect on patient quality of life and caregiver distress

“…Coverage of the checklist was 100% across interventionists for over 100 sessions. A biofeedback device, emWave2™ (Heartmath, Inc), was provided to caregivers assigned to PEPRR for relaxation exercises outside of session to provide biofeedback of vagal activity (a sign of relaxation) …”

“…A biofeedback device, emWave2™ (Heartmath, Inc), was provided to caregivers assigned to PEPRR for relaxation exercises outside of session to provide biofeedback of vagal activity (a sign of relaxation). 21 As an attention control, caregivers randomized to eTAU received, via email, all sections from the workbook provided with PEPRR.…”

Biofeedback for Everyday Stress Management: A Systematic Review

“…Three main HRV indices are typically used for biofeedback in the context of stress management, namely cardiac coherence, the ratio of low-frequency to high-frequency power (LF/HF ratio) and SDNN (standard deviation of IBI data). Cardiac coherence score/value is the most common HRV feature used for biofeedback (McCraty et al, 2009;Henriques et al, 2011;Lemaire et al, 2011;De Jonckheere et al, 2014;Whited et al, 2014;Ratanasiripong et al, 2015;Sarabia-Cobo, 2015). Cardiac coherence describes the level of resonance between heart rate variations and the respiration cycle.…”

“…The biofeedback data are displayed on the screen of a personal computer (n = 24) or a mobile/portable device (n = 15). The ambient medium allows the users to receive biofeedback information through the surroundings in a physical Larkin et al, 1992;Goodie and Larkin, 2006;McCraty et al, 2009;Strunk et al, 2009;Cutshall et al, 2011;Henriques et al, 2011;Morarend et al, 2011;Edvardsson et al, 2012;Moraveji et al, 2012;Paul and Garg, 2012;Sanchez et al, 2012;Sutarto et al, 2012;Wells et al, 2012;Wu et al, 2012Wu et al, , 2015Prinsloo et al, 2013;Peira et al, 2014;Whited et al, 2014;Lewis et al, 2015;Pusenjak et al, 2015;Sarabia-Cobo, 2015;Meier and Welch, 2016;Munafò et al, 2016Animations Feijs et al, 2013Al Osman et al, 2016 Visual scene Bouchard et al, 2012;De Jonckheere et al, 2014;Gaggioli et al, 2014;Dillon et al, 2016;van Rooij et al, 2016 Virtual character Chittaro and Sioni, 2014;Arroyo-Palacios and Slater, 2016 Modified game Parnandi et al, 2013;Kotozaki et al, 2014 Ambient light Snyder et al, 2015 Auditory Musical expression Yokoyama et al, 2002;Morarend et al, 2011;Vidyarthi and Riecke, 2013;...…”

“…A total of 18 studies used within-subjects design and 23 studies used between-subjects design (including 20 RCTs). In addition, two studies (Wu et al, 2012;Sarabia-Cobo, 2015) used a quasi-experimental design, and one study (Vidyarthi and Riecke, 2013) conducted a qualitative experiment through a post-test interview.…”