http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/113735.php
Yoga And Meditation Change Gene Response To Stress
02 Jul 2008
Research from the US suggests that mind body techniques like yoga and
meditation that put the body in a state of deep rest known as the
relaxation response, are capable of changing how genes behave in
response to stress.
The study is the work of researchers at Benson-Henry Institute for
Mind/Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the
Genomics Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and is
published online in the open-access journal PLoS One.
Mind-body practices that produce a relaxation response have been used
by people across cultures for thousands of years to prevent and treat
disease, wrote the authors in their background to the study.
The relaxation response is characterized by reduction in oxygen
intake, increase in exhalation of nitric oxide, and lower
psychological distress. Many experts see it as the counterpart to the
"flight or fight" stress response that has already been shown by a
number of studies to have a distinct pattern of physiological and gene
expression changes (called "transcriptional profile").
The researchers for this study wanted to test the idea that the
relaxation response also produces changes in gene expression.
The researchers recruited three groups of people. In the first group
(called the M group) there were 19 long term practitioners who had
been practising various ways of producing the relaxation response
every day for a long time (for instance with daily yoga, repeated
prayer or meditation practice).
In the second group were another 19 people who they called the
"healthy controls" (group N1), who were not daily practitioners, and
the third group was like the healthy controls group, except these 20
people completed 8 weeks of relaxation response training (this group
was N2).
The researchers *****sed transcriptional profiles of the people in all
three groups from blood samples.
They found the expressions of a total of 2,209 genes were
significantly different between groups M and N1, and a total of 1,561
genes were similarly significantly different between groups N2 and N1.
More im****tantly, however, was the fact 433 of the genes were common
to both sets of comparisons: the same ones were different between M
and N1 and between M and N2, so even short term practise of the
relaxation response appeared to produce changes in these 433 gene
expressions.
....
Libermann said they used "cutting edge" genomic analysis and the
"latest bioinformatics tools to identify potential gene functions,
generating hypotheses that can then be tested in laboratory or
clinical studies."
"There are a lot of differences in gene expression between one healthy
person and another, so it is challenging to analyze the kinds of
subtle changes we are seeing and identify what changes are significant
and what are just background noise," explained Libermann.
--
Luke
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