Steven Reinberg, HealthDay: For black Americans suffering from heart disease, meditation might help prevent heart attacks, strokes and early death, a small new study suggests.

These benefits appear to be the results of meditation’s ability to lower blood pressure, stress and anger, all of which have been linked to increased cardiovascular risk, researchers say.

“This is a whole new physiological effect on top of conventional treatment,” said lead researcher Dr. Robert Schneider, director of the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention in Fairfield, Iowa. “People can prevent heart disease reoccurrence using their own mind-body connection. People have this internal self-healing ability.”

An outside …

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Gordon Richman, Washington Times: Alzheimer’s is devastating and terrifying. Our grandparents are fighting it now, our parents preparing to fight it, and we know that we’re next. A recent bittersweet NPR piece explained that in order for most currently-conceived Alzheimer’s drugs to work effectively, patients would have to start treatment early– up to 20 years early.

Most of us, as much as we fear Alzheimer’s, don’t want to take a cocktail of drugs for something that may or may not happen in 20 years. Although there are brilliant scientists and physicians working on helping people with Alzheimer’s (and those who might suffer from it in …

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Don’t think meditation is just for new-age hippies. Scientists have found genuine benefits in ‘mindfulness’ – a combination of psychotherapy and meditation increasingly used by the NHS to treat disorders ranging from addiction to insomnia.

Regular practice of a few simple exercises can help to alleviate conditions by calming mind and body and breaking unhelpful thought patterns.

Here, in the first extract from his book, Dr Jonty Heaversedge describes an exercise that can help manage pain …

FOCUS ON BREATHING

Experience the sensation of air flowing into your nostrils, streaming down the back of …

Julie Deardorff, Tribune Newspapers: Regular practice shown to decrease symptoms of stress and depression.

A simple form of mindful meditation can help breast cancer survivors stave off the symptoms of depression, new research suggests. But the potential benefits don’t stop there.

Meditation may help wipe out some of those repetitive thoughts about the past or future that can clutter the mind once treatment ends. It may also reduce loneliness and decrease the body’s inflammatory response to stress — which can trigger serious illness — according to a small study published in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity.

“Mindfulness meditation is particularly effective in buffering …

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Lizzie Fuhr, Fitsugar: Meditation may sound like a far-out concept for a woman who considers herself straightlaced, but there’s nothing strange about relieving daily pressures and moving forward with a healthier outlook. If you’re a little skeptical of sitting down to meditate, know that it doesn’t have to be all about aligning your chakras and chanting a mantra! A few minutes of deep contemplation and breathing in your own style can shift your relationship with the day and keep you in better shape.

It lowers stress levels: You may think that meditation isn’t real science, but studies have shown a correlation between meditation …

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My earliest memories of being happy are of playing in the ocean. When our family began going to Cape Cod in the summer, the low piney woods, high dunes, and wide sweep of white sand felt like a true home. We spent hours at the beach, diving into the waves, body surfing, practicing somersaults underwater. Summer after summer, our house filled with friends and family—and later, with spouses and new children. It was a shared heaven. The smell of the air, the open sky, the ever-inviting sea made room for everything in my life—including whatever difficulties I was carrying in my heart.

Then came the morning some years ago …

CHristine Hsu: Federal health officials have released a set of videos featuring the scientific research of how yoga works, the safety of yoga and whether yoga can help treat certain health problems.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) says that the videos can help viewers make informed decisions if they’re interested in practicing the ancient Hindu meditation practice.

Researchers say for instance that there is accumulating scientific evidence that while yoga may be beneficial for lower back pain, the meditation practice has not been proven to help treat asthma and research into …

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Training in mindfulness meditation or exercise is linked to a decrease in the severity and duration of acute respiratory infections (ARIs) in adults, according to a study published in the July/August issue of the Annals of Family Medicine.

To assess the preventive effects of meditation or exercise on incidence, duration, and severity of ARI illness, Bruce Barrett, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and associates conducted a randomized trial involving 149 adults (82 percent female; 94 percent white; mean age, 59.3 years). Participants underwent eight weeks of training in mindfulness meditation (51 participants) or moderate-intensity sustained exercise (47 participants), or were part of an observational control (51 …

New to meditation and already thinking about quitting? You may have simply chosen the wrong method. A new study published online July 7 in EXPLORE: The Journal of Science and Healing highlights the importance of ensuring that new meditators select methods with which they are most comfortable, rather than those that are most popular.

If they do, they are likely to stick with it, says Adam Burke, the author of the study. If not, there is a higher chance they may abandon meditation altogether, losing out on its myriad personal and medical benefits. Burke is a professor of Health Education at SF State and the director of SF State’s Institute for …

Regular meditation could decrease the risk of developing cardiovascular disease in teens who are most at risk, according to Georgia Health Sciences University researchers.

In a study of 62 black teens with high blood pressure, those who meditated twice a day for 15 minutes had lower left ventricular mass, an indicator of future cardiovascular disease, than a control group, said Dr. Vernon Barnes, a physiologist in the Medical College of Georgia and the Georgia Health Sciences University Institute of Public and Preventive Health.

Barnes, Dr. Gaston Kapuku, a cardiovascular researcher in the institute, and Dr. Frank Treiber, a psychologist and former GHSU Vice President for Research, co-authored the study published in Evidence-Based …