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Say Om: Doctors Find Meditation Affects Your
Body
A Preliminary Study Shows Meditating Turns off Stress-Related
Genes
It turns out peaceful thoughts really can influence our bodies,
right down to the instructions we receive from our DNA,
according to a new study.
Doctors say 10 minutes a day of relaxing meditation or prayer
can change the expression of stress-related genes. Researchers
for the study, published in the Public Library of Science, took
blood samples from a group of 19 people who habitually
meditated or prayed for years, and 19 others who never
meditated.
The researchers ran genomic analyses of the blood and found
that the meditating group suppressed more than twice the number
of stress-related genes -- about 1,000 of them -- than the
nonmeditating group.
The more these stress-related genes are expressed, the more the
body will have a stress response like high blood pressure or
inflammation. Over long periods of time, these stress responses
can worsen high blood pressure, pain syndromes and other
conditions.
The nonmeditating group then spent 10 minutes a day for eight
weeks training in relaxation techniques that involved repeating
a prayer, thought, sound, phrase or movement.
"What this does is to break the train of everyday thought --
you no longer have stressful thoughts and because of that the
body is able to return to a healthy state," said Dr. Herbert
Benson, director emeritus of the Benson-Henry Institute
Mind/Body Medicine and an associate professor of medicine at
Harvard Medical School.
By the end of the training, the novice meditating group was
also suppressing stress-related genes, although at lower levels
than those of the long-term meditating people.
Meditation in the Genes
"In the old days, we thought the mind didn't affect the body,"
Benson said. "In truth, it's breaking down the very old
rule."
Read the rest of the article by clicking the link in the
resource box.
by Lauren Cox - July 2, 2008
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Source:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=5287805&page=1
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