The neurobiological mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effects of meditation therapy in patients with schizophrenia remain poorly understood, therefore, we aim to investigate the relationship between clinical symptoms and the structural changes in brain gray matter in a meditation intervention trial. Han inpatients with schizophrenia admitted to the Shanghai First Civil Affairs Mental Health...
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...
Meditation combined with antipsychotic medication can effectively improve the clinical symptoms and prognosis of patients with schizophrenia, but its underlying neural circuit mechanism is not clear. Many previous studies have shown that the symptoms of schizophrenia are related to dysfunction of the insula. We aimed to explore the neural circuitry mechanisms associated with insular dynamic...
Cerebral CortexJuly 1, 2024Yupeng Han, Lizhao Du, Qiyun Huang et al.
Meditation, mental training that aims to improve one's ability to regulate their cognition, has been widely applied in clinical medicine. However, the mechanism by which meditation affects brain activity is still unclear. To explore this question, electroencephalogram data were recorded in 20 long-term meditators and 20 nonmeditators during 2 high-level cognitive tasks (meditation and mental...
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...
In recent years, research on meditation as an important alternative therapy has developed rapidly and been widely applied in clinical medicine. Mechanism studies of meditation have also developed progressively, showing that meditation has great impact on brain structure and function, and epigenetic and telomere regulation. In line with this, the application of meditation has gradually been...
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...
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...