medRxivNovember 20, 2025Qing Wang, Lizhao Du, Jialing Sheng et al.
preprint
Whether and how meditation benefits severe psychosis over clinically meaningful timescales remains unclear. We embedded longitudinal neuroimaging in an eight-month, parallel group randomized clinical trial (ChiCTR1800014913) of male inpatients (n=64) with schizophrenia receiving daily clinician-guided meditation plus rehabilitation versus rehabilitation alone. Meditation improved the symptoms...
This study investigated the impact of an 8-month daily-guided intensive meditation-based intervention (iMI) on persistent hallucinations/delusions and health-related quality of life (QoL) in male inpatients with schizophrenia with treatment-refractory hallucinations and delusions (TRHDs). A randomized controlled trial assigned 64 male inpatients with schizophrenia and TRHD equally to an 8-month...
Background: Advancements in research have confirmed that gut microbiota can influence health through the microbiota-gut-brain axis. Meditation, as an inner mental exercise, can positively impact the regulation of an individual's physical and mental health. However, few studies have comprehensively investigated faecal microbiota following long-term (several years) deep meditation. Therefore, we...
Meditation has been a spiritual and healing practice in the East for thousands of years. However, the neurophysiologic mechanisms underlying its traditional form remain unclear. In this study, we recruited a large sample of monks (n = 73) who practice Tibetan Buddhist meditation and compared with meditation-naive local controls (n = 30). Their electroencephalography (EEG) and electrocardiogram...
Summary Background There have been mixed reports on the beneficial effects of meditation in cardiovascular disease (CVD), which is widely considered the leading cause of death worldwide. Methods To clarify the role of meditation in modulating the heart-brain axis, we implemented an extreme phenotype strategy, i.e., Tibetan monks (BMI > 30) who practised 19.20 ± 7.82 years of meditation on...
Despite accumulating evidence suggesting improvement in one's well-being as a result of meditation, little is known about if or how the brain and the periphery interact to produce these behavioral and mental changes. We hypothesize that meditation reflects changes in the neural representations of visceral activity, such as cardiac behavior, and investigated the integration of neural and...
Meditation is a progressive process in which meditators may experience different stages to finally reach a deep meditation state. However, the temporal-dynamic process of meditation remains unclear. In this study, we recruited 38 experienced Tibetan Buddhism meditators to explore the dynamic process from resting to deep meditation from the aspects of EEG oscillations and networks. We found that...
Recently, the increased prevalence of depression largely affects people's quality life and raises social suicide rate. Meanwhile, depression has been reported associated with lipid abnormalities, one of the major risks of cardiovascular disease and diabetes. 1 Hence, the improvement of lipid metabolism is of critical for depressive patients' health care. Meditation, an ancient mind training to...