Systematic Review for the Medical Applications of Meditation in Randomized Controlled Trials.
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health January 22, 2022 Do-Young Kim, Soo-Hwa Hong, Seung-Hyeon Jang et al.
A systematic review of 104 randomized controlled trials involving 10,139 participants with 45 different disorders found that meditation-based interventions—primarily mindfulness-based, yoga-based, and transcendental meditation—most often targeted symptoms such as depressive mood, anxiety, quality of life, stress, sleep, pain, and fatigue. Positive outcomes were most frequently reported for sleep (73.9% of trials) and fatigue (68.4% of trials). The review provides a comprehensive overview of how therapeutic meditation has been studied in clinical populations, highlighting the most common conditions and symptoms addressed, though methodological heterogeneity remains a challenge.