Can meditation help prevent the effects of ageing?

[bananas]

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140701-can-meditation-delay-ageing

Can meditation help prevent the effects of ageing?
By Jo Marchant
1 July 2014

Can meditation really slow down the effects of age? One Nobel Prize-winner is finding the scientific in the spiritual, writes Jo Marchant.

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Working with biologist Joe Gall at Yale in the 1970s, Blackburn sequenced the chromosome tips of a single-celled freshwater creature called Tetrahymena (“pond scum”, as she describes it) and discovered a repeating DNA motif that acts as a protective cap. The caps, dubbed telomeres, were subsequently found on human chromosomes too. They shield the ends of our chromosomes each time our cells divide and the DNA is copied, but they wear down with each division. In the 1980s, working with graduate student Carol Greider at the University of California, Berkeley, Blackburn discovered an enzyme called telomerase that can protect and rebuild telomeres. Even so, our telomeres dwindle over time. And when they get too short, our cells start to malfunction and lose their ability to divide – a phenomenon that is now recognised as a key process in ageing. This work ultimately won Blackburn the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In 2000, she received a visit that changed the course of her research. The caller was Elissa Epel, a postdoc from UCSF’s psychiatry department. Psychiatrists and biochemists don’t usually have much to talk about, but Epel was interested in the damage done to the body by chronic stress, and she had a radical proposal.

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“Ten years ago, if you’d told me that I would be seriously thinking about meditation, I would have said one of us is loco,” she told the New York Times in 2007. Since her initial study with Epel, the pair have become involved in collaborations with teams around the world – as many as 50 or 60, Blackburn estimates, spinning in “wonderful directions”. Many of these focus on ways to protect telomeres from the effects of stress; trials suggest that exercise, eating healthily and social support all help. But one of the most effective interventions, apparently capable of slowing the erosion of telomeres – and perhaps even lengthening them again – is meditation.

So far the studies are small, but they all tentatively point in the same direction. In one ambitious project, Blackburn and her colleagues sent participants to meditate at the Shambhala mountain retreat in northern Colorado. Those who completed a three-month-long course had 30% higher levels of telomerase than a similar group on a waiting list. A pilot study of dementia caregivers, carried out with UCLA’s Irwin and published in 2013, found that volunteers who did an ancient chanting meditation called Kirtan Kriya, 12 minutes a day for eight weeks, had significantly higher telomerase activity than a control group who listened to relaxing music. And a collaboration with UCSF physician and self-help guru Dean Ornish, also published in 2013, found that men with low-risk prostate cancer who undertook comprehensive lifestyle changes, including meditation, kept their telomerase activity higher than similar men in a control group and had slightly longer telomeres after five years.

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[JayhawkSD]

3. Well, I'm one of the masses.

I'm 71. I was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease eight years ago. I have had emphysema for more than 30 years, and have lost more than 40% of both lungs. I've had one myocardial infarction, had one cardiac arrhythmia resolved by ablation, and have two more unresolved. I've had about ten strokes.

I took up meditation about thirty years ago and engage in it multiple times daily, usually quite briefly, sometimes only for a few minutes, although I start each day with 15-20 minutes.

Most people who meet me think I'm in my sixties and assume that I'm in perfect health. There is no visible evidence of illness other than a slight hand tremor which few people notice, and a slight shortness of breath on the second, or sometimes third, flight of stairs.

Yes, I think meditation not only helps us live longer, but to liver better as well.

[valerief]

4. Best of luck to you. I read the OP incorrectly. nt

[JayhawkSD]

5. Well, yes I do take medication, but I didn't say anything about medication.

But I know quite a few people who take one hell of a lot more medication than I do, have far fewer medical issues, and are in far less comfortable condition.

For instance: I take about half of the maximum daily dose of Levadopa/Carbadopa and have symptoms which are not visible to the casual observer, eight years after diagnosis. Most people after eight years are on the maximum dose and have a tremor which is sufficiently severe so as to interfere with their ability to function. My neurologist is constantly commenting on the amazing degree to which my disease is not progressing.

The pulmanologist who I see annually for checkups says that looking at my x-rays and scans it should be medically impossible for me to function at all without supplemental oxygen, and that he has no clue how I am able to maintain a 92% blood oxygen level with the portion of my lungs which remain intact. I take no meication whatever for my lungs.

I attribute the difference to attitude and, mostly, to meditation.

[valerief]

6. That's a wonderful recommendation for meditation. nt

[gwheezie]

2. My dad meditates

He's 89. I think it saved his life. 20 years ago he had a heart attack and was told he was not a candidate for bypass due to the extensive damage he had. So he became very pro active and was compliant with his treatment which included meditation. Also he is a vegetarian and goes to the gym. He did cut the gym from 5 to 3 days. But he meditates every day.

[The Traveler]

7. It is an interesting result

Even though I am an advocate of meditation (effective stress management, pleasant, and dials in the creative elements of the mind), the "strength of the signal" is surprising to me.

A Buddhist monk once suggested to me that all religions really do for us is to construct and organize symbols and procedures that were effective at "speaking to" functions of the mind which are not directly accessible through language or logic. In his view, those functions were quite powerful and not well described by science or psychology. He claimed they included body repair, intelligence increase, acute intuition, artistic creativity, etc. While he himself professed a belief in spiritual processes like reincarnation, he noted that beliefs of that sort were unnecessary to the practice and the achievement of skill in exerting control over those functions.

In my observation, meditation is an art ... and some of us are Da Vincis while others draw stick figures at best. I tend towards the stick figure end of the meditation talent scale. But I still find it useful.

Trav