Transcendental Meditation for the improvement of health and wellbeing in community-dwelling dementia caregivers [TRANSCENDENT]: a randomised wait-list controlled trial
BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine May 8, 2015 M. Leach, A. Francis, T. Ziaian
A pilot trial tested whether Transcendental Meditation (TM) training could reduce stress and improve quality of life, mood, and cognitive performance in people caring for family members with dementia. Seventeen caregivers were randomly assigned to a 12-week TM program or a wait-list control. The TM group showed significantly greater improvement in response speed on a cognitive test compared to the control group. Changes in other measures of stress, depression, and quality of life did not reach statistical significance, though trends favored TM. Adverse events were mostly mild and transient. Because the study was small, no firm conclusions can be drawn about TM's effectiveness for dementia caregivers.