Meditation News and Research

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The term meditation refers to a variety of techniques or practices intended to focus or control attention. Most of them are rooted in Eastern religious or spiritual traditions. These techniques have been used by many different cultures throughout the world for thousands of years.

Today, many people use meditation outside of its traditional religious or cultural settings as a form of mind-body medicine. Many claims have been made about its value in promoting or improving health and wellness.

Paroxysmal AF patients who practice yoga have better quality of life

Yoga improves quality of life in patients with paroxysmal atrial fibrillation, according to research published today in the European Journal of Cardiovascular Nursing. Heart rate and blood pressure also decreased in patients who did yoga.

14 Mar 2016

Mindful eating could improve heart health, glucose levels

Given the high stress levels, extended periods of screen time and regular social outings many Americans experience day-to-day in environments where high-calorie foods are readily available, it can be easy to fall into the habit of mindless eating - where we're too distracted to pay attention to how much, what and why we're eating. Research suggests that practicing mindfulness - or taking the time to bring awareness to present-moment experiences with an open attitude of curiosity and non-judgment - can be effective in allowing us to make more thoughtful food choices and recognize when we are hungry, satisfied or full.

9 Mar 2016

Study provides window into the brain changes that link mindfulness meditation with health-related benefits

Over the past decade, mindfulness meditation has been shown to improve a broad range of health and disease outcomes, such as slowing HIV progression and improving healthy aging. Yet, little is known about the brain changes that produce these beneficial health effects.

5 Feb 2016

Meditation reduces anxiety, pain and fatigue in women undergoing breast cancer biopsies

Meditation eases anxiety, fatigue and pain for women undergoing breast cancer biopsies, according to researchers at the Duke Cancer Institute. They also found that music is effective, but to a lesser extent.

5 Feb 2016

Preschoolers with poor short-term recall at risk of dropping out of high school

If your toddler is a Forgetful Jones, you might want to help boost his or her brainpower sooner rather than later. New research shows that preschoolers who score lower on a memory task are likely to score higher on a dropout risk scale at the age of 12.

13 Jan 2016

Regular practice of Transcendental Meditation benefits active-duty service members

Regular practice of Transcendental Meditation enables some active duty service members battling post-traumatic stress disorder to reduce or even eliminate their psychotropic medication and get better control of their often-debilitating symptoms, researchers report in the journal Military Medicine.

12 Jan 2016

CMU's David Creswell awarded $3 million NIH grant to explore healthy aging among lonely older adults

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a five-year, $3 million grant to Carnegie Mellon University's David Creswell to study how stress management training can boost healthy aging among lonely older adults.

1 Dec 2015

New study: Are GPs over prescribing sleeping tablets?

The team at SleepCogni are dedicated to changing the nations’ sleep habits and conducted an independent study in October 2015 to give a snapshot view of current sleep behaviour.

30 Nov 2015

Brain analysis provides new insight on where happiness happens

Exercising, meditating, scouring self-help books... we go out of our way to be happy, but do we really know what happiness is? Wataru Sato and his team at Kyoto University have found an answer from a neurological perspective. Overall happiness, according to their study, is a combination of happy emotions and satisfaction of life coming together in the precuneus, a region in the medial parietal lobe that becomes active when experiencing consciousness.

23 Nov 2015

Treating insomnia through a CBT device? An interview with Dr Ebrahim

Insomnia refers to a clinical condition that is characterised by one or more of the following – difficulty initiating sleep and/or maintaining sleep and/or waking up too early AND associated with symptoms the next day such as sleepiness, lethargy, loss of concentration.

16 Nov 2015

Study shows mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than placebo

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found new evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces pain more effectively than placebo.

11 Nov 2015

Novel culturally-informed treatment benefits caregivers of people with schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe and disabling psychiatric disorder that affects about one percent of the population in the United States. Approximately 60 percent of those suffering from this condition live with a relative. Despite the fact that that family interventions have shown to significantly improve outcomes for individuals with schizophrenia, only about seven percent of patients with this illness receive any family therapy.

6 Nov 2015

Tai Chi, better sleep quality reduce inflammation, depression and age-related morbidities

Inflammatory processes occur throughout the body, with a primary function of promoting healing after injury. However, when too active, these inflammatory processes can also damage the body in many ways, and may contribute to heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, and other significant medical problems.

6 Nov 2015

Preschoolers' working memory can predict later dropout risk

Preschoolers who score lower on a working memory task are likely to score higher on a dropout risk scale at the age of 13, researchers at Université Sainte-Anne and the University of Montreal revealed today.

3 Nov 2015

People who exhibit dispositional mindfulness less likely to develop obesity, belly fat

A study of nearly 400 people finds that those who exhibited more 'dispositional mindfulness', or awareness of and attention to their current feelings and thoughts, were less likely to be obese and had less abdominal fat than people who did not exhibit as much of that awareness.

20 Oct 2015

Being a grandparent good for your health, says SLU geriatrician

Note to Mimi, Didi, Gigi, G-Ma and the rest of the gang who have swapped out your own pet names for Grandma: Being a grandparent is good for your health. So says Angela Sanford, M.D., assistant professor of geriatrics at Saint Louis University.

20 Oct 2015

Religion satisfies 16 basic human desires, says OSU psychologist

Throughout history, scholars and researchers have tried to identify the one key reason that people are attracted to religion.

6 Oct 2015

Mental focussing may trigger learning mechanisms

A study conducted with experienced scholars of Zen-Meditation shows that mental focussing can induce learning mechanisms, similar to physical training. Researchers at the Ruhr-University Bochum and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University München discovered this phenomenon during a scientifically monitored meditation retreat. The journal "Scientific Reports", from the makers of "Nature", has now published their new findings on the plasticity of the brain.

27 Aug 2015

New analyses examine role of religion, spirituality in cancer patients' mental, social and physical well-being

Research reveals that most individuals with cancer have religious and spiritual beliefs, or derive comfort from religious and spiritual experiences. But what impact does this have on patients' health? Recent analyses of all published studies on the topic--which included more than 44,000 patients--shed new light on the associations of religion and spirituality with cancer patients' mental, social, and physical well-being.

10 Aug 2015

Hormones play dual role in unethical behavior

Hormones play a two-part role in encouraging and reinforcing cheating and other unethical behavior, according to research from Harvard University and The University of Texas at Austin.

29 Jul 2015