Scientific Reports
October 28, 2025
Sacha Haudry, Natacha Lambert, Christian Gaser et al.
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...
Scientific Reports
September 29, 2025
Flora Hähnel, Antoine Lutz, Gaël Chételat et al.
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...
Scientific Reports
May 15, 2025
Florence Requier, Hamed Mohammadi, Harriet Demnitz-King et al.
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...
Neuropsychology, development, and cognition. Section B, Aging, neuropsychology and cognition
March 1, 2025
Florence Requier, Harriet Demnitz-King, Eric Frison et al.
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...
Imaging Neuroscience
2025
Sacha Haudry, Sophie Dautricourt, Julie Gonneaud et al.
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...
Scientific Reports
November 27, 2024
Sacha Haudry, Anne-Laure Turpin, Brigitte Landeau et al.
3 citations
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...
Scientific Reports
November 27, 2024
Sacha Haudry, Anne-Laure Turpin, Brigitte Landeau et al.
3 citations
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...
Scientific Reports
November 2, 2024
Marco Schlosser, Julie Gonneaud, Stefano Poletti et al.
2 citations
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...
Alzheimer S and Dementia Diagnosis Assessment and Disease Monitoring
2024
Ylenia D'elia, Tim Whitfield, Marco Schlosser et al.
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...
JAMA Network Open
July 3, 2023
Harriet Demnitz-King, Florence Requier, Tim Whitfield et al.
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....
PLoS One
2023
Marco Schlosser, Harriet Demnitz-King, Thorsten Barnhofer et al.
13 citations
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...
PLoS One
2023
Marco Schlosser, Olga Klimecki, Fabienne Collette et al.
6 citations
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...
October 31, 2022
Marco Schlosser, Olga Klimecki, Fabienne Collette et al.
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,...
JAMA Neurology
October 10, 2022
Gaël Chételat, Antoine Lutz, Olga Klimecki et al.
45 citations
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...
Alzheimer's Research & Therapy
September 6, 2022
Tim Whitfield, Harriet Demnitz-King, Marco Schlosser et al.
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...
Ageing Research Reviews
October 1, 2021
Antoine Lutz, Gaël Chételat, Fabienne Collette et al.
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...
Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics
April 19, 2021
Natalie L. Marchant, Thorsten Barnhofer, Roxane Coueron et al.
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...
Scientific Reports
August 25, 2017
Gaël Chételat, Florence Mezenge, Clémence Tomadesso et al.
67 citations
Aging is associated with progressive cerebral volume and glucose metabolism decreases. Conditions such as stress and sleep difficulties exacerbate these changes and are risk factors for Alzheimer's disease. Meditation practice, aiming towards stress reduction and emotion regulation, can downregulate these adverse factors. In this pilot study, we explored the possibility that lifelong meditation...