Jue's Blog

I’m proud to announce my journalistic debut this Monday, a news report on a study which claimed to show that transcendental meditation decreases the risk of death due to heart disease. On Wednesday, my article earned a (mostly) positive nod from Paul Raeburn of the Knight Science Journalism tracker, a blog that “peer reviews” science reporting on the web.

Mr. Raeburn wondered why news outlets didn’t give this study very much attention, considering how dramatic–more to the point, how publicly funded–its results were. He also criticized what little coverage there was for being too credulous and not asking a few obvious methodological questions. I know this is old news now, but since I was one of the reporters who dropped the yoga ball (so to speak) with this story, I’ll try to clear up a few facts that were lost in Monday’s deadline shuffle. Info that wasn’t previously reported is in bold.

(You may want to read my original article and the study’s press release to get a few basic details. Don’t worry, both are short.)

The main result of the study was a 47% drop in the number of incidences of heart attack, stroke, and death in the treatment group relative to the control group. The abstract also gives a statistically significant p=0.03 for this result. That’s a big drop, comparable to “a new category of potent medications,” according to the study’s lead author, Dr. Robert Schneider of the Maharishi University of Management. I wasn’t able to attend the American Heart Association meeting, where this was presented (a paper is still forthcoming), and it seems like nobody else writing about the study did either. However, I was able to later obtain the data presented in the talk, which indicates that there were 31 “events” (i.e. heart attacks, strokes, and deaths) in 102 patients in the control group, versus 20 events in 99 patients in the treatment group.

You might also wonder if there are clinical differences between the two groups of patients at the outset which could skew the results; this can happen by chance even when patients are randomly assigned to the treatment group. Dr. Schneider acknowledges that there were certain “minor differences in psychosocial factors” between the two groups, but doesn’t think this “affected the results substantially.” In this case, “psychosocial” refers to demographic and psychological factors such as education, stress, depression, hostility, and so on.

So what does this all mean? It doesn’t mean the study is bunk–we really can’t say for sure until the paper comes out, and other experts get a chance to look at it. But I’d be hesistant to claim, as my original headline did, that “Meditation Halves Risk of Heart Attack,” or at least meditation alone. This is not some new kind of miracle therapy, and certainly doesn’t replace normal drugs and lifestyle interventions for treating heart disease. And fortunately, I think any journalist more experienced than I knew this from the start, so there wasn’t the sort of overanticipation that has accompanied more hot-topic biomedical research in the past.

At the same time though, meditation in itself is a really simple thing, and if it works, then it’s a valuable adjunct to conventional therapies. You could think of it as a key to unlocking the relaxation and stress relief mechanisms that are inherent in your body. And if it doesn’t, then what’s the harm? (Assuming you don’t, as some commenters on ScienceNOW pointed out, shell out $3000 to learn Transcendental Meditation®–whether that’s necessary is a story for a different blog post.)