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

ABSTRACT: 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 l

SUBMITTER: Luders E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4300906 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature