Effects of Meditation on Structural Changes of the Brain in Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment or Alzheimer's Disease Dementia.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience January 1, 2021 Madhukar Dwivedi, Neha Dubey, Aditya Jain Pansari et al.
Long-term meditation practice in people with mild cognitive impairment or mild Alzheimer's disease dementia leads to beneficial changes in cortical thickness and gray matter volume. After six months, meditators showed greater increases in several brain regions involved in executive control and memory compared to non-meditators, including left caudal middle frontal, left rostral middle frontal, left superior parietal, right lateral orbitofrontal, and right superior frontal cortices. Some areas, such as left lateral occipital and right posterior cingulate cortices, showed lower cortical thickness changes in meditators. In the hippocampus, meditators had greater gray matter volume increases in left CA1, molecular layer HP, and CA3 subfields, and the right thalamus also increased in volume. These brain regions are prominently at risk in neurodegenerative diseases.