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Negative correlations between global gray matter and age. The X-axis displays the chronological age (in years); the Y-axis displays the global gray matter volume (in ml). Note the less steep slope of the regression line in meditators (yellow) compared to controls (cyan).
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While overall life expectancy has been increasing, the human brain still begins deteriorating after the first two decades of life and continues degrading further with increasing age. Thus, techniques that diminish the negative impact of aging on the brain are desirable. Existing research, although scarce, suggests meditation to be an attractive can...
Citations
... For instance, recent studies suggest that meditation can promote favorable changes in CNS dopaminergic and other neurochemical systems [144,145], and increase blood flow, oxygen delivery, and glucose utilization in specific regions of the brain associated with mood elevation, memory, and attentional processing, including the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate gyrus [94,141,[146][147][148]. Long-term meditation practice has also been associated with cortical thickening and increased grey matter volume in brain regions involved in attentional performance, memory, sensory processing, and interoception [149][150][151], apparently offsetting typical age-related cortical thinning and grey matter loss [149,151,152]. While data regarding CNS changes with music are more limited, neuroimaging studies likewise suggest that music therapy, including ML, activates pathways in brain areas involved in emotional reward and regulation, attention, memory, and other associated functions, including the prefrontal cortex, insular and cingulate cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala [63,66,143]. ...
Background: Older adults with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) are at increased risk not only for Alzheimer’s disease, but for poor mental health, impaired sleep, and diminished quality of life (QOL), which in turn, contribute to further cognitive decline, highlighting the need for early intervention.
Objective: In this randomized controlled trial, we assessed the effects of two 12-week relaxation programs, Kirtan Kriya Meditation (KK) and music listening (ML), on perceived stress, sleep, mood, and health-related QOL in older adults with SCD.
Methods: Sixty community-dwelling older adults with SCD were randomized to a KK or ML program and asked to practice 12 minutes daily for 12 weeks, then at their discretion for the following 3 months. At baseline, 12 weeks, and 26 weeks, perceived stress, mood, psychological well-being, sleep quality, and health-related QOL were measured using well-validated instruments.
Results: Fifty-three participants (88%) completed the 6-month study. Participants in both groups showed significant improvement at 12 weeks in psychological well-being and in multiple domains of mood and sleep quality (p’s≤0.05). Relative to ML, those assigned to KK showed greater gains in perceived stress, mood, psychological well-being, and QOL-Mental Health (p’s≤0.09). Observed gains were sustained or improved at 6 months, with both groups showing marked and significant improvement in all outcomes. Changes were unrelated to treatment expectancies.
Conclusions: Findings suggest that practice of a simple meditation or ML program may improve stress, mood, well-being, sleep, and QOL in adults with SCD, with benefits sustained at 6 months and gains that were particularly pronounced in the KK group.
... MBSR was also shown to affect emotional regulation in short-and long-term meditators by influencing amygdala reactivity (Kral et al. 2018). A link between meditation and healthy aging was established by a work on long-term meditators showing significant reduction of age-related gray matter atrophy, with a potential positive impact on aging and neurodegenerative processes (Luders et al. 2015). ...
Epigenetic mechanisms are key processes that constantly reshape genome activity carrying out physiological responses to environmental stimuli. Such mechanisms regulate gene activity without modifying the DNA sequence, providing real-time adaptation to changing environmental conditions. Both favorable and unfavorable lifestyles have been shown to influence body and brain by means of epigenetics, leaving marks on the genome that can either be rapidly reversed or persist in time and even be transmitted trans-generationally. Among virtuous habits, meditation seemingly represents a valuable way of activating inner resources to cope with adverse experiences. While unhealthy habits, stress, and traumatic early-life events may favor the onset of diseases linked to inflammation, neuroinflammation, and neuroendocrine dysregulation, the practice of mindfulness-based techniques was associated with the alleviation of many of the above symptoms, underlying the importance of lifestyles for health and well-being. Meditation influences brain and body systemwide, eliciting structural/morphological changes as well as modulating the levels of circulating factors and the expression of genes linked to the HPA axis and the immune and neuroimmune systems. The current chapter intends to give an overview of pioneering research showing how meditation can promote health through epigenetics, by reshaping the profiles of the three main epigenetic markers, namely DNA methylation, histone modifications, and non-coding RNAs.
... More specifically, we found brain differences (meditators > controls) occuring in the OFC, IFG and PCC for GMV and in the temporal, occipital, and parietal gyri for perfusion; while no difference was found in the opposite direction (controls > meditators). Overall, our findings are in agreement with the literature, as previous studies consistently found more preserved brain structure and function in expert meditators compared to controls in the context of older adult populations 26,[29][30][31][32][33] , although few studies focused on older adults. As for the specific brain regions, most of them are congruent with previous findings. ...
Meditation is a mental training approach that can improve mental health and well-being in aging. Yet the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The Medit-Ageing model stipulates that three mechanisms — attentional, constructive, and deconstructive — upregulate positive psycho-affective factors and downregulate negative ones. To test this hypothesis, we measured brain structural MRI and perfusion, negative and positive psycho-affective composite scores, and meditation mechanisms in 27 older expert meditators and 135 meditation-naive older controls. We identified brain and psycho-affective differences and performed mediation analyses to assess whether and which meditation mechanisms mediate their links.
Meditators showed significantly higher volume in fronto-parietal areas and perfusion in temporo-occipito-parietal areas. They also had higher positive and lower negative psycho-affective scores. Attentional and constructive mechanisms both mediated the links between brain differences and the positive psycho-affective score whereas the deconstructive mechanism mediated the links between brain differences and the negative psycho-affective score.
Our results corroborate the Medit-Ageing model, indicating that, in aging, meditation leads to brain changes that decrease negative psycho-affective factors and increase positive ones through relatively specific mechanisms. Shedding light on the neurobiological and psycho-affective mechanisms of meditation in aging, these findings provide insights to refine future interventions.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-024-79687-3.
... flexibility such as being more readily able to adapt, change, and switch gears (Luders et al., 2015;Wang, n.d.). In alignment, a 23-study mini-review by Rathore et al. (2022) noted that meditative practices of all types highlighted improved prefrontal cortex (PFC) functioning and reduced negative psychological symptoms such as stress, anxiety, and depression. ...
Creating and maintaining a culture of compassionate-focused healthcare stems from nurturing providers’ self-compassion set forth by their self-compassionate clinical instructors. In higher education, instructor self-compassion is not a priority. Intentional self-kindness, interconnected with the universality of human suffering, is the wellspring for compassionate care and makes it possible. Educator self-compassion should then be an essential component of teachers’ instructional methods and adult learner-centered frameworks – known as pedagogy and andragogy, respectively – to prepare future nurses and healthcare professionals for field entry, and advanced and specialized direct-care roles. Therefore, this doctoral research employed an experimental design with intervention and control group to better understand clinical educator self-compassion. Data from three distributions of the 26-item Self-Compassion Scale across two independent groups were analyzed using the Mann Whitney U test. It was hypothesized that the workshop-as-intervention participants would demonstrate increased self-compassion levels after seven-days after the workshop and sustain these levels when retested 30-days post-baseline testing. It was also hypothesized the experimental group’s post-intervention levels would be significantly higher than non-intervention workshop subjects. While the experimental group did maintain levels between days seven and 30, the other hypotheses were not supported by statistical testing. The most meaningful finding was that the workshop-as-intervention group demonstrated statistically significant & moderately lower measurements in over-identification 30 days after their initial pre-workshop tests, the most common negative component rated by both groups in baseline testing. In the future this study will be replicated for further use and wider impact.
... Meditation research has grown exponentially in recent years, and an increasing number of studies suggest that meditation might slow age-related cognitive decline as well as tissue loss in the brain [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. One brain region reported to be involved in meditation and altered in meditation practitioners is the orbitofrontal cortex [7,[11][12][13][14]. ...
... The study included 50 meditation practitioners and 50 control subjects, with ages between 24 and 77 years; a detailed sample description is provided elsewhere [9]. Importantly, both groups were matched for sex (28 men and 22 women in each group) as well as for age (mean ± SD controls: 51.4 ± 12.8 years; meditators: 50.4 ± 11.8 years). ...
... In addition, both groups were comparable in terms of handedness and education, and were free from neurological and psychiatric disorders, as previously described [27]. The meditators had an active lifetime practice between 4 and 46 years (mean ± SD: 19.8 ± 11.4 years); an overview of individual meditation practices in this sample has been provided elsewhere [9]. All study participants gave informed consent in accordance with the policies and procedures of the Institutional Review Board at the University of California (UCLA). ...
The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a functionally heterogeneous brain region contributing to mental processes relating to meditation practices. The OFC has been reported to decline in volume with increasing age and differs in volume between meditation practitioners and non-practitioners. We hypothesized that the age-related decline of the OFC is diminished in meditation practitioners. We tested this hypothesis in a sample of 50 long-term meditators and 50 matched controls by correlating chronological age with regional gray matter volumes of the left and right OFC, as well as in seven left and right cytoarchitectonically defined subregions of the OFC (Fo1–Fo7). In both meditators and controls, we observed a negative relationship between age and OFC (sub)volumes, indicating that older participants have smaller OFC volumes. However, in meditators, the age-related decline was less steep compared to controls. These age-related differences reached significance for left and right Fo2, Fo3, Fo4, and Fo7, as well as left Fo5 and right Fo6. Since different subregions of the OFC are associated with distinct brain functions, further investigations are required to explore the functional implications of these findings in the context of meditation and the aging brain.
... can learn demographic information [178][179][180][181]. Studies have shown that neuroimaging-derived age prediction corresponds to the influences of other disorders, such as cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease, and age and sex per se [182][183][184], which have been explored in several brain illnesses. The disparities between predicted and chronological ages may be attributed to the accumulation of age-related alterations in pathological circumstances [185][186][187] or protective factors in brain aging [188,189]. Furthermore, CXR-derived age can be used as an imaging biomarker to indicate the state of the thorax or metabolism [175][176][177] and successfully predict lifespan, mortality, cardiovascular risk, and heart failure prognosis [175,177,190], providing a solid foundation for the imaging biomarker concept. Another approach for extracting relevant prognostic imaging biomarkers involves training a deep survival model using staged binary classifiers of death or incident cancer [175,191,192]. ...
Artificial intelligence (AI) in radiology is a rapidly developing field with several prospective clinical studies demonstrating its benefits in clinical practice. In 2022, the Korean Society of Radiology held a forum to discuss the challenges and drawbacks in AI development and implementation. Various barriers hinder the successful application and widespread adoption of AI in radiology, such as limited annotated data, data privacy and security, data heterogeneity, imbalanced data, model interpretability, overfitting, and integration with clinical workflows. In this review, some of the various possible solutions to these challenges are presented and discussed; these include training with longitudinal and multimodal datasets, dense training with multitask learning and multimodal learning, self-supervised contrastive learning, various image modifications and syntheses using generative models, explainable AI, causal learning, federated learning with large data models, and digital twins.
... (Smart, 2019). Further, there is a significant crosssectional body of literature comparing long-term (LT) meditators to matched healthy adults with no meditation experience (Luders et al., 2009(Luders et al., , 2013b(Luders et al., , 2014Newberg et al., 2010;Kurth et al., 2015;Laneri et al., 2015). Experimental studies have demonstrated the effects of MM on the brain can emerge over relatively brief timeframes (e.g., 8-week intervention studies to 15 min MM induction) (Smart, 2019). ...
Mindfulness meditation has been shown to be beneficial for a range of different health conditions, impacts brain function and structure relatively quickly, and has shown promise with aging samples. Functional magnetic resonance imaging metrics provide insight into neurovascular health which plays a key role in both normal and pathological aging processes. Experimental mindfulness meditation studies that included functional magnetic resonance metrics as an outcome measure may point to potential neurovascular mechanisms of action relevant for aging adults that have not yet been previously examined. We first review the resting-state magnetic resonance studies conducted in exclusively older adult age samples. Findings from older adult-only samples are then used to frame the findings of task magnetic resonance imaging studies conducted in both clinical and healthy adult samples. Based on the resting-state studies in older adults and the task magnetic resonance studies in adult samples, we propose three potential mechanisms by which mindfulness meditation may offer a neurovascular therapeutic benefit for older adults: (1) a direct neurovascular mechanism via increased resting-state cerebral blood flow; (2) an indirect anti-neuroinflammatory mechanism via increased functional connectivity within the default mode network, and (3) a top-down control mechanism that likely reflects both a direct and an indirect neurovascular pathway.
... In addition, several mindful practices can promote neuroplasticity and increase brain connectivity during adolescence and adulthood (Fox & Cahn, 2021;H€ olzel et al., 2011;Tang, H€ olzel, & Posner, 2015), suggesting a positive influence across age groups, including a contribution to healthy aging. For example, in one interesting study the link between aging and gray matter was analyzed on long-term meditators, demonstrating a significant reduction in age-related gray matter atrophy and a potential positive impact on aging and neurodegeneration, as compared to an age-matched control group (Luders, Cherbuin, & Kurth, 2015). ...
Many environmental and lifestyle related factors may influence the physiology of the brain and body by acting on fundamental molecular pathways, such as the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) and the immune system. For example, stressful conditions created by adverse early-life events, unhealthy habits and low socio-economic status may favor the onset of diseases linked to neuroendocrine dysregulation, inflammation and neuroinflammation. Beside pharmacological treatments used in clinical settings, much attention has been given to complementary treatments such as mind-body techniques involving meditation that rely on the activation of inner resources to regain health. At the molecular level, the effects of both stress and meditation are elicited epigenetically through a set of mechanisms that regulate gene expression as well as the circulating neuroendocrine and immune effectors. Epigenetic mechanisms constantly reshape genome activities in response to external stimuli, representing a molecular interface between organism and environment. In the present work, we aimed to review the current knowledge on the correlation between epigenetics, gene expression, stress and its possible antidote, meditation. After introducing the relationship between brain, physiology, and epigenetics, we will proceed to describe three basic epigenetic mechanisms: chromatin covalent modifications, DNA methylation and non-coding RNAs. Subsequently, we will give an overview of the physiological and molecular aspects related to stress. Finally, we will address the epigenetic effects of meditation on gene expression. The results of the studies reported in this review demonstrate that mindful practices modulate the epigenetic landscape, leading to increased resilience. Therefore, these practices can be considered valuable tools that complement pharmacological treatments when coping with pathologies related to stress.
... Benefits include reduced stress and anxiety levels, improved sleep, improved mood, and an increase in resilience and coping skills [20,21], all factors that contribute to improved mental health, wellbeing, and quality of life. In addition, people who meditate have been shown to have less age-related brain atrophy [22]. Unlike cognitive behavioural therapy, which is goal oriented, mindfulness meditation relies on nonjudgmental observation. ...
Kidney disease is often progressive, and patients experience diminished health-related quality of life. In addition, the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and its associated restrictions, has brought many additional burdens. It is therefore essential that effective and affordable systems are explored to improve the psychological health of this group that can be delivered safely during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this study is to support a new service development project in partnership with the UK’s leading patient support charity Kidney Care UK by implementing the four-session Compassionate Mindful Resilience (CMR) programme, developed by MindfulnessUK, and explore its effectiveness for patients with stage 4 or 5 chronic kidney disease or have received a kidney transplant. The study will utilise a quasi-experimental, pretest/posttest design to measure the effect of the CMR programme on anxiety, depression, self-compassion, the ability to be mindful, wellbeing, and resilience, using pre- and posttests, alongside a qualitative exploration to explore factors influencing the feasibility, acceptability, and suitability of the intervention, with patients (and the Mindfulness Teacher) and their commitment to practice. Outcomes from this study will include an evidence-based mindfulness and compassion programme for use with people with kidney disease, which is likely to have applicability across other chronic diseases.
... A negative correlation was found within both groups, suggesting atrophy over time. However, the slopes of the regression lines were steeper for controls than meditators, again suggesting meditation may be neuroprotective for age-related atrophy (Luders et al. 2014). Larger volume and increased gyrification in the right anterior insula have been found to specifically correlate with duration of meditation training (Holzel et al. 2008, Luders et al. 2012). ...
