Meditation associated with slower age-related loss of gray matter in the brain

February 6, 2015

Negative correlations between global gray matter and age. The X-axis displays the chronological age (in years); the Y-axis displays the global gray matter volume (in ml). Note the less-steep slope of the regression line in meditators (yellow) compared to controls (cyan). (Credit: Frontiers in Psychology)

Results of a new study by UCLA researchers suggest that meditation may help preserve the brain’s gray matter, the tissue that contains neurons.

The researchers cautioned, however, that they cannot draw a direct, causal connection between meditation and preserving gray matter in the brain. Too many other factors may come into play, including lifestyle choices, personality traits, and genetic brain differences.

Since 1970, life expectancy around the world has risen dramatically, with people living more than 10 years longer. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that starting when people are in their mid-to-late-20s, the brain begins to wither — its volume and weight begin to decrease.

As baby boomers have aged and the elderly population has grown, the incidence of cognitive decline and dementia has increased substantially as the brain ages.

“In that light, it seems essential that longer life expectancies do not come at the cost of a reduced quality of life,” said Dr. Eileen Luders, first author and assistant professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “While much research has focused on identifying factors that increase the risk of mental illness and neurodegenerative decline, relatively less attention has been turned to approaches aimed at enhancing cerebral health.”

As this occurs, the brain can begin to lose some of its functional abilities. Although people are living longer, the years they gain often come with increased risks for mental illness and neurodegenerative disease.

So building on their earlier work that suggested people who meditate have less age-related atrophy in the brain’s white matter, the scientists have now looked specifically at the association between age and gray matter.

Widespread apparent effects of meditation on the brain

The researchers compared 50 people who had mediated for years and 50 who didn’t. Each group in the study was made up of 28 men and 22 women ranging in age from 24 to 77. Those who meditated had been doing so for four to 46 years, with an average of 20 years.

The participants’ brains were scanned using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging.

Although the researchers found a negative correlation between gray matter and age in both groups of people — suggesting a loss of brain tissue with increasing age — they also found that large parts of the gray matter in the brains of those who meditated seemed to be better preserved, Kurth said.

Florian Kurth, PhD, a co-author of the study 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.”

“Our results are promising,” Luders said. “Hopefully they will stimulate other studies exploring the potential of meditation to better preserve our aging brains and minds. Accumulating scientific evidence that meditation has brain-altering capabilities might ultimately allow for an effective translation from research to practice, not only in the framework of healthy aging but also pathological aging.”

The paper appears in the current online edition of the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology.

The research was supported by the Brain Mapping Medical Research Organization, the Robson Family and Northstar Fund, the Brain Mapping Support Foundation, the Pierson‐Lovelace Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Tamkin Foundation, the William M. and Linda R. Dietel Philanthropic Fund at the Northern Piedmont Community Foundation, the Jennifer Jones‐Simon Foundation, the Capital Group Companies Foundation and an Australian Research Council fellowship (120100227). Nicolas Cherbuin of the Australian National University was also an author of the study.


Abstract of Forever Young(er): potential age-defying effects of long-term meditation on gray matter atrophy

While overall life expectancy has been increasing, the human brain still begins deteriorating after the first two decades of life and continues degrading further with increasing age. Thus, techniques that diminish the negative impact of aging on the brain are desirable. Existing research, although scarce, suggests meditation to be an attractive candidate in the quest for an accessible and inexpensive, efficacious remedy. Here, we examined the link between age and cerebral gray matter re-analyzing a large sample (n = 100) of long-term meditators and control subjects aged between 24 and 77 years. When correlating global and local gray matter with age, we detected negative correlations within both controls and meditators, suggesting a decline over time. However, the slopes of the regression lines were steeper and the correlation coefficients were stronger in controls than in meditators. Moreover, the age-affected brain regions were much more extended in controls than in meditators, with significant group-by-age interactions in numerous clusters throughout the brain. Altogether, these findings seem to suggest less age-related gray matter atrophy in long-term meditation practitioners.