The article below is quoted from “Self Realization Magazine”
Can Meditation Affect Your Health at the Genetic Level?
“It really is time to stop thinking of our DNA as immutable.
Even thinking can change it.”
“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,” reported ABC news recently.
And, the Washington Post reports that researchers involved
in the study “say they’ve taken a significant stride forward
in understanding how relaxation techniques such as meditation,
prayer and yoga improve health: by changing patterns of gene
activity that affect how the body responds to stress.”
The collaborative investigation by members of the Benson-Henry
Institute for Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General
Hospital and the Genomics Center at Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center was published in the journal of the Public
Library of Science, Plos ONE.
Scientists have long known that there are particular genes
that predispose a person to specific diseases and health
disorders – but that merely carrying a breast-cancer gene,
for example, does not guarantee the onset of that condition.
Genes can be turned on or off by various factors, which means
they may or may not express the instructions carried by the
DNA.
“Now we’ve found how changing the activity of the mind can
alter the way basic genetic instructions are implemented,”
states Harvard Medical School professor Herber Benson, M.D.,
co-senior author of the Plos ONE report. “The mind can
actively turn on and turn off genes.”
Towia Libermann, Ph. D., director of the Beth Israel Deaconess
Medical Center Genomics Center and the report’s co-senior
author, adds, “This is the first comprehensive study of how
the mind can affect gene expression, linking what has been
looked on as a “soft” science with the “hard” science of
genomices.”
“Mind-body practices that elicit the relaxation response
(such as meditation, repetitive prayer, yoga, tai-chi,
breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, etc.)
have been used worldwide for millennia to prevent and treat
disease,” the research report said.
“This study provides the first compelling evidence that the
relaxation response elicits specific gene expression changes
in short-term and long-term practitioners.”
The study indicated that the relaxation response alters
the expression of genes involved with processes such as
inflammation, programmed cell death (which can keep
genetically impaired cells from turning into cancers),
and how the body handles free radicals – molecules produced
by normal metabolism that, if not appropriately neutralized,
can damage cells and tissues.
According to the ABC News summary: “Researchers for the
study took blood samples from a group of nineteen people
who habitually meditated or prayed for years, and nineteen
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 non-meditating 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 non-meditating group then spent ten minutes a day for
eight weeks training in relaxation techniques that involved
repeating a prayer, thought, sound, phrase or movement. 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.”
In their Public Library of Science report, the researchers
stated: “It is becoming increasingly clear that psycho-social
stress can manifest as system-wide perturbations of cellular
processes… Chronic psycho-social has been associated with
accelerated aging at the cellular level… and with increased
vulnerability to a variety of disease states. Our results
suggest that consistent and constitutive changes in gene
expression resulting from the relaxation response may relate
to long-term physiological effects.”
Commenting on these results, the noted science columnist
Sharon Begley of Newsweek observed: “The genes in our cells
don’t matter one iota if they’re not turned on, and there
are many things in life that can turn off bad genes such
as those that raise the risk of disease such as breast cancer.
It really is time to stop thinking of our DNA as immutable.
Even thinking can change it.”
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