For the first time, an international team of scientists was able to identify the biological mechanism underlying the therapeutic effect of deep meditation.
Researchers have found that after just eight hours of meditation, specific changes occur in the body at the genetic and molecular level.
The authors - specialists from the University of Wisconsin (USA), the Institute for Biomedical Research (Barcelona, Spain) and the Center for Neurological Research of the INSERM Institute (Lyon, France) - studied the effect of a day spent in "clear mind meditation" on a group of 19 experienced meditators.
Clear Mind Meditation is a state of impartial awareness of what is happening. In this form of meditation, a person is guided to focus on their breathing and bodily sensations, calmly letting uncomfortable thoughts and emotions through themselves.
The control group consisted of 21 people with no meditation experience. They were encouraged to engage in quiet, non-meditative activities in the same environment. In all participants, before and after the experiment, the levels of expression of genes associated with circadian rhythms, chromatin modification and inflammation in peripheral blood mononuclear cells were determined. In addition, both groups underwent special tests aimed at assessing the indicators of the body's stress resistance.
At the start, the levels of expression of the studied genes in both groups of participants were approximately the same. However, eight hours of deep meditation was found to have affected several HDAC histone deacetylase genes, which epigenetically regulate the activity of other genes, and the pro-inflammatory RIPK2 and COX2 genes.
The expression levels of all these genes were found to be reduced in meditators compared with the control group. At the same time, a decrease in the expression of the RIPK2 and HDAC2 genes, as the researchers found, is associated with a faster physical recovery of the body after the release of the hormone cortisol in a situation of social stress - for example, when you need to impromptu in front of the public.
The fact that the changes did not affect other genes suggests that meditation only affects some of the specific regulatory pathways involved in the mechanisms underlying its therapeutic potential, the authors note.
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"Changes are observed in genes that are usually targets of anti-inflammatory and analgesic drugs, so the results obtained are the basis for future research on the possibility of using meditative practices for the treatment of chronic inflammatory diseases," the authors emphasize.