Study indicates that simple meditation performed at home can alter the brain structure and increase grey matter in patients suffering mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild Alzheimer’s disease
A new study, supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and conducted by the International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIITH) in collaboration with the Neurology Department of Apollo Multispeciality Hospital, Kolkata, reveals that simple meditation performed at home can alter the brain structure and increase grey matter in patients suffering mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and mild Alzheimer’s disease.
The drugs presently available to treat Alzheimer’s do not possess any disease-modifying effects, but only give temporary relief of symptoms. The severity of impairment often worsens within five years in more than half of
MCI patients, leading to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. This has prompted researchers to seek alternative options for managing the disease.
Dr Amitabha Ghosh, Head of Neurology at Apollo Multispeciality Hospital, Kolkata and Dr Bapi Raju, Cognitive Science research centre at IIITH, together lead a joint research team with researcher Neha Dubey and Dr Raju’s students, Madhukar Dwivedi and Aditya Jain Pansari to understand the effects of meditation on MCI and early Alzheimer’s patients.
Methods and findings
The team assigned patients having MCI or early Alzheimer’s into Meditation and Control groups. Before beginning the study, MRI brain scans were taken from both groups. Patients in the Mediation group were advised to meditate at home for 30 minutes each day in a quiet, sitting posture with help of audio instructions from a CD. After six months, both groups again were given MRI brain scans, and the findings revealed that patients in the Meditation group showed a marked increase in cortical thickness and volume of grey matter, particularly in the prefrontal area of the brain, which coincided with a reduction in thickness in the posterior area of the brain. Dr Amitabha Ghosh spoke about two kinds of networks that exist in the brain.
“One is activated by attention or when focusing on a task, whereas the other takes over when there is no specific task to perform and during mind wandering,” he said, noting that the latter is part of the default mode network (DMN). The DMN is the network of brain regions active when a person is not consciously focusing on the outside world. Usually, we operate with a continual switch between the two networks. “However, in patients with MCI or Alzheimer’s disease, where the networks degenerate, the switch does not always take place as efficiently. hence you find them losing attention, getting distracted and having memory lapses,” said Dr Ghosh.
Meditation increases one’s focus, causing a conscious disengagement from floating thoughts. The findings of increased grey matter in the frontal area corroborate the fact that it is this area of the brain that involves attention, decisiveness and attaining goals. The reduced grey matter in the posterior area indicates suppression of some of the nodal regions of the DMN. This study was conducted as part of DST’s Science And Technology of Yoga And Meditation (SATYAM) programme under its Cognitive Science Research Initiative. Apollo Multispeciality Hospital recruited patients according to neuropsychological assessments, while IIITH carried out image processing and analysis of the brain images. The team intends to follow up this study with a larger number of participants for a longer duration.
“We are considering applying for one more grant to make it a formal clinical trial so that meditation as an intervention can be registered as a treatment method,” says Dr Bapi.
