New Study Shows How Meditation Can Keep Us Young

Amy Taylor February 13, 2015

As people increase in age, so is their risk of developing mental health problems and neurodegenerative diseases. Fortunately, new research has figured out how an ancient mind-body healing technique can minimise such risk.

Researchers from University of California, Los Angeles found that meditation appeared to help preserve the brain’s gray matter, the tissue that contains neurons. They looked specifically at the association between age and gray matter. They compared 50 people who had mediated for years and 50 who didn’t. People in both groups showed a loss of gray matter as they aged. But the researchers found among those who meditated, the volume of gray matter did not decline as much as it did among those who didn’t.

Each group in the study was made up of 28 men and 22 women ranging in age from 24 to 77. Those who meditated had been doing so for four to 46 years, with an average of 20 years.

The participants’ brains were scanned using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging. Although the researchers found a negative correlation between gray matter and age in both groups of people—suggesting a loss of brain tissue with increasing age—they also found that large parts of the gray matter in the brains of those who meditated seemed to be better preserved, Kurth said.

The researchers cautioned that they cannot draw a direct, causal connection between meditation and preserving gray matter in the brain. Too many other factors may come into play, including lifestyle choices, personality traits, and genetic brain differences.

"We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating," he said. "Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain." Says Dr Florian Kurth, a co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Centre.

"In that light, it seems essential that longer life expectancies do not come at the cost of a reduced quality of life," said Dr Eileen Luders, first author and assistant professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "While much research has focused on identifying factors that increase the risk of mental illness and neurodegenerative decline, relatively less attention has been turned to approaches aimed at enhancing cerebral health."

"Still, our results are promising," Luders said. "Hopefully they will stimulate other studies exploring the potential of meditation to better preserve our aging brains and minds. Accumulating scientific evidence that meditation has brain-altering capabilities might ultimately allow for an effective translation from research to practice, not only in the framework of healthy aging but also pathological aging."

The new study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Source of this article: Forever Young(er): potential age-defying effects of long-term meditation on gray matter atrophy