Abstract Study objectives Aging is associated with increased sleep complaints and changes in sleep architecture, microstructure and rest-activity rhythms. Meditation-based interventions have shown benefits on subjective sleep quality, but their effects on objective sleep parameters remain largely underexplored. This study investigated the effects of an 18-month meditation intervention on sleep...
Reviews in the NeurosciencesJune 3, 2026Thomas Le François, Charlotte E Hilberdink, Bérengère Guillery-Girard et al.
Mindfulness meditation has received growing interest in research over the past decades. Mindfulness meditation training (MMT) can be employed as a mental practice to improve cognitive skills such as attention and emotion regulation and may promote well-being. Neuroimaging studies have emerged to understand the effects of MMT on brain functioning. However, no review exists on the effects of MMT...
Meditation is thought to promote healthy aging by improving mental health, preserving brain integrity and reducing Alzheimer's disease risk. We examined the impact of long-term meditation expertise and an 18-month meditation training on brain aging in older adults using machine learning. We included 25 Older Expert Meditators (OldExpMed) with > 20 years of practice and 135 Cognitively...
Loneliness is a key predictor for mortality and a risk factor for dementia. Meditation training appears to be a promising intervention for loneliness in older adults, but long-term randomized controlled trials with an active control group are scarce. To fill this gap, this secondary analysis of the three-armed clinical randomized controlled Age-Well trial compares the impact of an 18-month...
Meditation practice has been shown to impact resting-state EEG activity in expert meditators, but its benefits on sleep, which is particularly affected with age, are poorly understood. Our aim was to better understand the effects of long-term meditation practice on resting-state EEG and sleep in older adults. Twenty-seven elderly expert meditators (mean age ± SD: 70.7 ± 5.0 years) were compared...
With aging, slight changes in some cognitive processes can be observed. Therefore, we aimed to assess if meditation expertise is associated with preserved cognition in key domains affected in aging. We used data from two older-adult samples of the Medit-Ageing Age-well Study: 135 non-meditators and 27 expert meditators. We examined group differences in four objective cognitive domains...
Meditation is a family of ancient and contemporary contemplative mind-body practices that can modulate psychological processes, awareness, and mental states. Over the last 40 years, clinical science has manualized meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety. Over the past...
Aging is associated with cognitive changes, even in the absence of brain pathology. This study aimed to determine if meditation training, by comparison to active and passive control groups, is linked to changes in the perception of cognitive functioning in older adults. One hundred thirty-four healthy older participants from the Age-Well Randomized Clinical Trial were included: 45 followed a...
Meditation training in older adults has been proposed as a non-pharmacological intervention to promote healthy aging and lower the risks of developing Alzheimer's disease (AD). Resting-state dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) highlighted two brain states, the "strongly connected" and "default mode network (DMN)-negatively connected" states, associated with protective factors for...
Shorter telomeres are associated with increased risk of cognitive decline and age-related diseases. Developing interventions to promote healthy aging by preserving telomere integrity is of paramount importance. Here, we investigated the effect of an 18-month meditation intervention on telomere length (TL) measures in older people without cognitive impairment. A total of 137 adults age ≥65 years...
Meditation is a mental training approach that can improve mental health and well-being in aging. Yet the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The Medit-Ageing model stipulates that three mechanisms - attentional, constructive, and deconstructive - upregulate positive psycho-affective factors and downregulate negative ones. To test this hypothesis, we measured brain structural MRI and...
Meditation is a mental training approach that can improve mental health and well-being in aging. Yet the underlying mechanisms remain unknown. The Medit-Ageing model stipulates that three mechanisms - attentional, constructive, and deconstructive - upregulate positive psycho-affective factors and downregulate negative ones. To test this hypothesis, we measured brain structural MRI and...
Understanding the factors that predict why some individuals perceive to respond more to meditation training than others could impact the development, efficacy, adherence levels, and implementation of meditation-based interventions. We investigated individual-level variables associated with self- and teacher-perceived responsiveness to longer-term meditation training. This study presents a...
Short mindfulness-based interventions have gained traction in research due to their positive impact on well-being, cognition, and clinical symptoms across various settings. However, these short-term trainings are viewed as preliminary steps within a more extensive transformative path, presumably leading to long-lasting trait changes. Despite this, little is still known about the brain...
Older adults experiencing subjective cognitive decline (SCD) have a higher risk of dementia. Reducing this risk through behavioral interventions, which can increase emotional well-being (mindfulness and compassion) and physical activity, is crucial in SCD. SCD-Well is a multicenter, observer-blind, randomized, controlled, superiority trial. Three hundred forty-seven participants (mean [standard...
Nonpharmacological interventions are a potential strategy to maintain or promote cognitive functioning in older adults. To investigate the effects of 18 months' meditation training and 18 months' non-native language training on cognition in older adults. This study was a secondary analysis of the Age-Well trial, an 18-month, observer-masked, randomized clinical trial with 3 parallel arms....
Older adults with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) recruited from memory clinics have an increased risk of developing dementia and regularly experience reduced psychological well-being related to memory concerns and fear of dementia. Research on improving well-being in SCD is limited and lacks non-pharmacological approaches. We investigated whether mindfulness-based and health education...
As the world population is ageing, it is vital to understand how older adults can maintain and deepen their psychological well-being as they are confronted with the unique challenges of ageing in a complex world. Theoretical work has highlighted the promising role of intentional mental training such as meditation practice for enhancing human flourishing. However, meditation-based randomised...
Objectives: As the world population is ageing, it is vital to understand how older adults can maintain and deepen their psychological well-being as they are confronted with the unique challenges of ageing in a complex and vulnerable world. Theoretical work has highlighted the promising role of intentional mental training such as meditation practice for enhancing human flourishing. However,...
Importance: No lifestyle-based randomized clinical trial directly targets psychoaffective risk factors of dementia. Meditation practices recently emerged as a promising mental training exercise to foster brain health and reduce dementia risk. Objective: To investigate the effects of meditation training on brain integrity in older adults. Design, Setting, and Participants: Age-Well was a...
Older individuals with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) perceive that their cognition has declined but do not show objective impairment on neuropsychological tests. Individuals with SCD are at elevated risk of objective cognitive decline and incident dementia. Non-pharmacological interventions (including mindfulness-based and health self-management approaches) are a potential strategy to...
Alzheimer's disease (AD) represents a major health and societal issue; there is no treatment to date and the pathophysiological mechanisms underlying this disease are not well understood. Yet, there is hope that AD risk factors and thus the number of AD cases can be significantly reduced by prevention measures based on lifestyle modifications as targeted by non-pharmacological preventive...
Mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) are increasingly utilized to improve mental health. Interest in the putative effects of MBPs on cognitive function is also growing. This is the first meta-analysis of objective cognitive outcomes across multiple domains from randomized MBP studies of adults. Seven databases were systematically searched to January 2020. Fifty-six unique studies (n = 2,931) were...
Introduction: Older adults experiencing subjective cognitive decline (SCD) have a heightened risk of developing dementia and frequently experience subclinical anxiety, which is itself associated with dementia risk. Objective: To understand whether subclinical anxiety symptoms in SCD can be reduced through behavioral interventions. Methods: SCD-Well is a randomized controlled trial designed to...
Objectives: Deepening our understanding of the mechanisms by which meditation practices impact well-being and human flourishing is essential for advancing the science of meditation. The phenomenologically grounded classification system introduced by Dahl, Lutz, and Davidson (2015) distinguishes attentional, constructive, and deconstructive forms of meditation based on the psychological...