Sarah Knapton
24 JANUARY 2017
Mindfulness meditation, the practice of paying more attention to the present moment, helps lower stress hormones and decreases inflammation in the body, scientists have proven for the first time.
The training has been growing in popularity in recent years, with the NHS recommending mindfulness as a way to reduce stress and anxiety.
Studies have shown that mindfulness can decrease self-reported stress levels and make people feel calmer, but until now it was unknown if it was having a biological impact on the body.
Now scientists in the US have shown that an eight week course of mindfulness, involving daily classes, can help lower inflammatory molecules and stress hormones by around 15 per cent.
The therapy was shown to work better than a non-meditation stress management course.
“Mindfulness meditation training is a relatively inexpensive and low-stigma treatment approach, and these findings strengthen the case that it can improve resilience to stress,” said lead author Dr Elizabeth Hoge, associate professor in Georgetown University Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry.
“The study adds to evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in treating anxiety.”
The study, published in the journal Psychiatric Research, included 89 patients with anxiety disorder, a condition of chronic and excessive worrying which is thought to affect around three million people in Britain.
The participants were divided into two groups, with one taking an eight-week mindfulness course and the other taking a stress management course over the same period.
Before and after the training course, participants underwent the Trier Social Stress Test, a standard technique for inducing a stress response, in which the participants are asked at short notice to give a speech before an audience, and are given other anxiety-inducing instructions.
“We were testing the patients’ resilience because that’s really the ultimate question—can we make people handle stress better?” added Dr Hoge.
During the stress test, the team monitored blood-based markers of subjects’ stress responses, including levels of the stress hormone cortisol and the inflammatory proteins IL-6 and TNF-α, which usually ramp up when the body is fighting illness.
The control group who took the stress management course showed a modest rise in markers on the second test compared to the first, suggesting a worsening of their anxiety from having to endure the test again.
By contrast, the meditation group showed big drops in these markers on the second test, suggesting that the meditation training had helped them cope.
The team also found that the meditation group patients, compared to controls, experienced significantly greater reductions in self-reported measures of stress after their course.
Dr Hoge now wants to test whether mindfulness-related treatments can help other psychiatric conditions, and to compare treatments to standard psychiatric drug therapies.