健康生活:深度冥想的神奇效用_BEC初级作文

健康生活:深度冥想的神奇效用

多雷斯瓦米还称，有些短期研究已发现，冥想能提高如注意力和记忆力这样的认知能力。科学家利用成像技术发现，冥想能改善人们大脑中某些特定回路的功能特性，还可能减少随着年龄增长而出现的大脑中枢萎缩状况，特别是对于那些容易患上老年痴呆症(Alzheimer's disease，又称阿兹海默症)等病症的人更是如此。

In a study published last year in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, African-Americans with heart disease who practiced Transcendental Meditation regularly were 48% less likely to have a heart attack or stroke, or to die, than those who attended a health-education class. Among the meditation group, there were 20 such occurrences, compared with 32 in the control group. The study, which ran for more than five years, involved about 200 people.

美国心脏协会(American Heart Association)《循环》(Circulation)期刊上去年发表的一项名为《心血管特性和效果》(Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes)的研究表明，在患有心脏病的非洲裔美国人中，那些经常练习超觉冥想的人突发心脏病或中风、死亡的风险比那些参加健康教育课的人要低48%。在冥想小组中出现了20个这样的病发案例，而在实验对照组中，这一数据为32。该研究持续的时间超过了五年，总共涉及约200人。

Recent research found that meditation can result in molecular changes affecting the length of telomeres, a protective covering at the end of chromosomes that gets shorter as people age. The study involved 40 family caregivers of dementia patients. Half of the participants meditated briefly on a daily basis and the other half listened to relaxing music for 12 minutes a day. The eight-week study found that people who meditated showed a 43% improvement in telomerase activity, an enzyme that regulates telomere length, compared with a 3.7% gain in the group listening to music. The participants meditating also showed improved mental and cognitive functioning and lower levels of depression compared with the control group. The pilot study was published in January in the International Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry.