Recently, a health technology assessment of meditation practices was commissioned by the
Agency for Healthcare and Research Quality (AHRQ) and funded by the National Institutes
of Health (NIH)-National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM)
[13]. It was notable because the authors endeavored to exhaustively locate all available studies
and analyzed each meditation technique separately. Among the 813 studies of meditation and
health outcomes located, there were 27 controlled trials on hypertension, including 24
randomized trials. The main conclusions of the report on high BP were that, with exceptions,
the majority of meditation research was of low methodologic quality and that selected
meditation practices may be effective in reducing hypertension