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Argo, that [ 1 ] is a rather weak study that contains quite a bit of confounding effects: 3 months of meditation retreat vs 3 months of regular daily life does not measure the effect of meditation only. A reasonable control in my book would have them sit around about the same amount of time each day, with mental activity, but without meditation/introspection. Say a 3 month classroom setting on any university level subject) Not to mention that the control group was regularly flown in for the assessments, while the meditation group did not fly during those 3 months. Finally on the statistical front, they had very small group sizes for effects in humans (17 in retreat, 25 in control group that they could analyze), and excluded one further control sample that was much higher than the others (this sample would have completely covered the described telomerase effect). Biologically, a 1.3 fold increase in their 'telomerase units' is a tiny effect. 10.000 of the blood cells they extracted have about the telemerase activity of 11 cancer cells (and there's a cell that is basically immortal in the aging sense. It has about a about 1000x fold increase compared to these blood cells). Blood mononuclear cells typically aren't dividing cells either, though monocytes (a subgroup) might still divide a couple of times. So they're not supposed to have a decent telomerase activity in the first place, less they create a leukemia... Last, but not least, while running out of telomers does kill cells, it is a poor proxy for aging because the link between them is neither straight forward nor well established. To sum up my point: Meditation might affect aging, but Shamatha's study can not show it by its very design. The effects they show are statistically weak, heavily confounded with other variables besides meditation, and biologically most likely irrelevant. (And I haven't even started at the very heavy biased self-selection of participants...) So long, ->Tyberius Prime [ 1 ] Jacobs, T.L., Epel, E.S., Lin, J., Blackburn, E.H., Wolkowitz, O.M., Bridwell, D.A., Zanesco., A.P., Aichele, S.R., Sahdra, B.K., MacLean, K.A., King, B.G., Shaver, P.R., Rosenberg, E.L., Ferrer, E., Wallace, B.A., & Saron, C.D. (Accepted for Publication). Intensive meditation training, immune cell telomerase activity, and psychological mediators. Psychoneuroendocrinology [url=http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu/labs/Saron/pdf/Jacobs%20et%20al%202010%20Psychoneuroendocrinology.pdf]PDF[/url] PS: On the subject of aging, not on the subject of meditation, consider http://www.jumbojoke.com/i_rest_my_case.html :p Edit: Fallen into my own linking automatics. [small](Edited by [url=http://www.ozoneasylum.com/user/1424]Tyberius Prime[/url] on 09-01-2011 18:33)[/small]
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