Much of the health benefits associated with mindfulnes meditation training is due to the changes that this form of meditation causes in the brain.
Mindfulness meditation involves people making a conscious, focused practice of attending to their current state and sensations. Much of the health benefits associated with mindfulness meditation training is due to the changes that this form of meditation causes in the brain, suggests new research. "We have now seen that mindfulness meditation training can reduce inflammatory biomarkers in several initial studies, and this new work sheds light into what mindfulness training is doing to the brain to produce these inflammatory health benefits," said lead author David Creswell, associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US.
‘Mindfulness meditation training, compared to relaxation training, reduces Interleukin-6, an inflammatory health bio-marker. It improves the brain's ability to help manage stress.’
Published in the Biological Psychiatry, the new study showed that mindfulness meditation training, compared to relaxation training, reduces Interleukin-6, an inflammatory health bio-marker, in high-stress, unemployed community adults. For the randomized controlled trial, 35 job-seeking, stressed adults were exposed to either an intensive three-day mindfulness meditation retreat program or a well-matched relaxation retreat program that did not have a mindfulness component.
All participants completed a five-minute resting state brain scan before and after the three-day program.
They also provided blood samples right before the intervention began and at a four-month follow-up.
The brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation training increased the functional connectivity of the participants' resting default mode network in areas important to attention and executive control, namely the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
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The participants who completed the mindfulness meditation program also had reduced IL-6 levels, and the changes in brain functional connectivity coupling accounted for the lower inflammation levels.
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Source-IANS