Department of Neurology, School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Centre for Research on Ageing Health and Wellbeing, Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2015 Jan 21;5:1551. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01551. eCollection 2014.
While overall life expectancy has been increasing, the human brain still begins deteriorating after the first two decades of life and continues degrading further with increasing age. Thus, techniques that diminish the negative impact of aging on the brain are desirable. Existing research, although scarce, suggests meditation to be an attractive candidate in the quest for an accessible and inexpensive, efficacious remedy. Here, we examined the link between age and cerebral gray matter re-analyzing a large sample (n = 100) of long-term meditators and control subjects aged between 24 and 77 years. When correlating global and local gray matter with age, we detected negative correlations within both controls and meditators, suggesting a decline over time. However, the slopes of the regression lines were steeper and the correlation coefficients were stronger in controls than in meditators. Moreover, the age-affected brain regions were much more extended in controls than in meditators, with significant group-by-age interactions in numerous clusters throughout the brain. Altogether, these findings seem to suggest less age-related gray matter atrophy in long-term meditation practitioners.
虽然总体预期寿命一直在增加，但人类大脑在生命的头二十年之后仍开始恶化，并随着年龄的增长进一步退化。因此，需要有技术来减轻衰老对大脑的负面影响。尽管现有研究很少，但冥想被认为是一种有吸引力的候选方法，因为它具有易于获得且成本低廉、疗效显著的特点。在这里，我们通过重新分析年龄在 24 岁至 77 岁之间的大量长期冥想者和对照组参与者（n = 100），研究了年龄与大脑灰质之间的联系。当将整体和局部灰质与年龄相关联时，我们在对照组和冥想者中都检测到了负相关，表明随着时间的推移会出现下降。然而，在对照组中，回归线的斜率更陡，相关系数更强，而在冥想者中则较弱。此外，在对照组中，受年龄影响的大脑区域比冥想者更为广泛，在大脑的许多区域都存在显著的组间与年龄的交互作用。总的来说，这些发现似乎表明，长期冥想者的大脑灰质萎缩与年龄的相关性较小。
