Those suffering with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and early Alzheimer’s disease can try supervised mindfulness meditation, a non-invasive and cost-effective approach, for brain activation enhancements, researchers from Shri Chitra Tirunal Institute of Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum have advised.
Mild cognitive impairment and early form of Alzheimer’s is a condition in which memory deteriorates, but a person remains functionally independent.
Dr Ramshekhar N Menon, additional professor, SCTIMST, Trivandrum, Dr. C. Kesavadas, Dr. Bejoy Thomas, and Dr. Aley Alexander (SCTIMST) Dr. S Krishnan (Govt Medical College, Trivandrum) conducted a two-phased study with separate objectives for each phase.
The first phase was designed to explore neural correlations of mindfulness and study regions of brain activation enhancements among seasoned mindfulness practitioners and healthy non-practitioners through Imaging Biomarkers, which is the first of its kind multimodality imaging work in dementia from India.
The second phase was planned to verify the changes in cognitive performance of patients with MCI prior to, as well as subsequent to, mindfulness training. The team carried out cognitive retraining weekly for 1 hour and provided feedback on the performance of the retraining tasks at the end of each session.
The patients were given home-based tasks for practicing during the rest of the days. They also developed a 10 Weeks mindfulness meditation-based program for patients called ‘Mindfulness Unified Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (MUCBT)’ training program.
The results of initial resting-state fMRI indicated that compared to age-matched healthy subjects who did no form of meditation practice in their routine lifestyle, mindfulness practitioners establish increased connectivity, based on resting-state brain activity in medial prefrontal cortex.