Meditation might affect us on cellular level

[Ramscha]

Hello boys and girls,

I found a new study which is actually rather interesting for those of you who seek a healthier and longer life with their practice and studies. I suppose many of you practice some sort of meditation, therefore this might be interesting for you:

http://www.sciencealert.com/world-first ... vors-cells

They found out that the telomers, those little things protecting your cells from aging, were maintained much better in the group practicing Hatha-Yoga then in the group which did not. They don't know how it works and if this has any long term effect and even influences our health directly, but this first glance is still very interesting.

The study was rather small though, it was performed over just 3 months (which is short for a medical study) and the test groups were very small too (88 women participated). Additionally, all of them were suvivors of previous breast cancer.

Psychosocial interventions providing stress reduction and emotional support resulted in trends toward TL maintenance in distressed breast cancer survivors, compared with decreases in usual care.

The conclusion is fascinating and if further long term based tests with more participants display similar effects this would probably have a strong impact on the current understanding of medical treatment.

Study and Thread are based on the paper:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 29063/full

Ramscha

[Rin]

This isn't exactly earth shattering, there's a whole field called epigenetics which explores the effect the mind and mental processes have on our bodies on a cellular level, and there's quite a bit of research being done in the field vis a vis meditative and yogic practices. But it is interesting to see yet another mechanism by which these practices have beneficial effects on health.

You should check out The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton.

[Ramscha]

This isn't exactly earth shattering, there's a whole field called epigenetics which explores the effect the mind and mental processes have on our bodies on a cellular level, and there's quite a bit of research being done in the field vis a vis meditative and yogic practices. But it is interesting to see yet another mechanism by which these practices have beneficial effects on health.

You should check out The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton.

Well, that is not quite correct. Epigenetics doesn't really care especially about mind and mental effects on the body, but all cellular and physiological traits which are not caused by a change in the sequence of the genome. It is a rather young discipline though and the current base of knowledge is still scarce compared to other fields. But like all newcomers this discipline will be watched and expected to bring us the one or the other surprise to turn biology in some places upside down. Especially since modern genetics admittedly tends to be quite dogmatic.

Thank you very much for the hint with the book though. I heard of Lipton before but I haven't looked into his work yet though I will probably do so in the near future. His writings sound interesting.

Ramscha