Impact of meditation on age related brain- degeneration

Author: 
Shweta Saraswat., Kanishka Sharma and Sushil Chandra

A rapid advancement in age population gives rise to the need to overcome losses cause by ageing. Normal ageing not only affects the processing power of the brain but also associated with significant losses of brain tissues. Here, graph theory could play an important role for accurate diagnosis, by detecting change in clustering and topology of the brain networks due to disease and ageing factor. In neuro-imageing data of ageing graph theory parameters can easily measure out degeneration occur in the brain by analyzing change in structural and functional connectivity of brain. Rate of neuro-degeneration and cognitive decline in brain can be decrease by practicing meditation on regular basis. Meditation can also be a remedy to decrease anxiety and daily stress which are the main cause of brain-degeneration. In the present study on resting state EEG data of 34 subjects (20-50 years) functional connectivity of the brain has been analyzed in alpha and theta band accompanied with local and global efficiency of brain networks. The main focus of this study was on positive effects of meditation to compare the degeneration occurring in normal individual and a long term meditator due to ageing. Analysis by ANCOVA shows meditation as an effective practice to reduce effects of ageing. Motif number, path length, clustering coefficients, local and global efficiency are the quantifiers of functional connectivity, in which global efficiency find to be increased in theta band along with increase in motif number of the meditators as compared to controlled subjects whereas local efficiency of the meditators subjects nearly find to be same as young groups of the controlled subjects. Moreover, the global efficiency of the controlled subjects find to be increased in alpha band when compare with meditators.

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