Research Suggests Meditation Reduces Risk of Aging Brains

Ongoing research points to a variety of ways to maintain brain health through the aging process including eating a healthy diet and exercising. And, now, a new study shows meditation could be another way to minimize the risks of brain damage associated with aging.

 Building on their earlier work that suggested people who meditate have less age-related atrophy in the brain’s white matter, a study by UCLA researchers found that meditation appeared to help preserve the brain’s gray matter, the tissue that contains neurons.

These scientists 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.

Dr. Florian Kurth, a co-author of the study that appeared in the online edition of the journal Frontiers in Psychology and postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, said the researchers were surprised by the magnitude of the difference.

“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.”

For more about the study, visit http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/forever-young-meditation-might-slow-the-age-related-loss-of-gray-matter-in-the-brain-say-ucla-researchers.