Department of Neurology, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Centre for Research on Ageing Health and Wellbeing, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.
Psychiatry Res. 2015 Jun 30;232(3):214-8. doi: 10.1016/j.pscychresns.2015.03.008. Epub 2015 Apr 4.
Normal aging is known to result in a reduction of gray matter within the hippocampal complex, particularly in the subiculum. The present study was designed to address the question whether the practice of meditation can amend this age-related subicular atrophy. For this purpose, we established the correlations between subicular volume and chronological age within 50 long-term meditators and 50 control subjects. High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans were automatically processed combining cytoarchitectonically defined probabilistic maps with advanced tissue segmentation and registration methods. Overall, we observed steeper negative regression slopes in controls. The analysis further revealed a significant group-by-age interaction for the left subiculum with a significant negative correlation between age and subicular volume in controls, but no significant correlation in meditators. Altogether, these findings seem to suggest a reduced age-related atrophy of the left subiculum in meditators compared to healthy controls. Possible explanations might be a relative increase of subicular tissue over time through long-term training as meditation is a process that incorporates regular and ongoing mental efforts. Alternatively, because meditation is an established form of reducing stress, our observation might reflect an overall preservation of subicular tissue through a reduced neuronal vulnerability to negative effects of stress.
正常衰老会导致海马体复合体中的灰质减少，特别是在海马下托。本研究旨在探讨冥想练习是否可以纠正这种与年龄相关的海马下托萎缩。为此，我们在 50 名长期冥想者和 50 名对照者中建立了海马下托体积与实际年龄之间的相关性。采用高分辨率磁共振成像（MRI）扫描，结合细胞构筑定义的概率图谱与先进的组织分割和配准方法进行自动处理。总体而言，我们在对照组中观察到更陡峭的负回归斜率。进一步的分析还揭示了左侧海马下托的组-年龄交互作用，对照组的年龄与海马下托体积之间存在显著的负相关，而冥想者则没有显著相关性。总的来说，这些发现似乎表明冥想者的左侧海马下托与健康对照组相比，其与年龄相关的萎缩程度较低。可能的解释是，随着时间的推移，通过长期训练，海马下托组织的相对增加，因为冥想是一种包含定期和持续的心理努力的过程。或者，因为冥想是一种已被证实的减轻压力的形式，我们的观察结果可能反映了通过降低神经元对压力负面影响的易感性，从而整体上保存了海马下托组织。
