Text messages may be good for your heart

It appears text messages may be good for your heart. That is, texts that include heart-healthy reminders.

A study in Australia assigned 700 heart patients to two groups, one with the usual care and the other to also receive four healthy heart-related texts per month, such as encouraging exercise or to lower stress.

Almost 1/3 of the text group lowered their risk factors by exercising, controlling blood pressure and other healthy habits, compared to just 10-percent in the group who did not receive text messages.

The study didn't run long enough to see if the messages could lower the number of heart attacks, but it is a simple and cheap way to motivate people to make healthy decisions.