Effect of Gayatri Mantra on Health: A Narrative Review.

Abstract

Abstract –Practices of meditation have been beneficial for mankind since ages for maintaining good health and spiritual progress. Research on meditation has picked up pace in recent decades and many scientific studies have reported the beneficial effects of meditation on psycho-physiological and cognitive aspects. This article has reviewed the published empirical literature on Gayatri mantra, exploring its effects on mental health, cognitive functions and physiological parameters of health. The literature search was done on databases such as Scopus, Google scholar, PubMed, Web of science, EBSCO, Psycinfo, Cochrane, for published papers in English language only. This review included all randomized control trials, non-randomized control trials, self controlled study, pre-post and comparative studies in which Gayatri mantra was given as a primary intervention or in combination with one additional intervention. The data of the studies are presented by their objectives, intervention, methodology, tools used, participants and findings reported in the them, in both narrative and tabular form. The findings of the studies indicates weak to moderate evidence for the effect of gayatri mantra in improving mental health, cognitive functions, and wellbeing. In the comprehensive analysis of all the included studies, it was found that there are less number of evidences to conclude strongly about the effect of Gayatri mantra. Hence, there is a need of high quality empirical research with robust design on Gayatri mantra to study its effect further.